Camptown Ladies
Mari SanGiovanni
Bywater Books
Ann Arbor
To Kim, always, for my life.
Also for my sister,
who tirelessly pounds the streets in Provincetown,
harassing all the ladies to buy her sister’s books.
Contents
One: The Long Haul Wasn’t Designed for a U-Haul
Two: Camptown Ladies & Camp, Camp
Three: Scents & Insensibility
Four: Think Inside The Box
Five: Allowing Others to Touch Your Wood
Six: Campgrounds, Catholics & Curses
Seven: Testing For Soft Spots
Eight: Hanni And My Sister
Nine: Patty & Anne Should Have Done The Nasty
Ten: Sticks Or Stones
Eleven: Lisa, Unleashed
Twelve: Mobsters For Lobsters
Thirteen: Wonder Woman Attacks!
Fourteen: Would You Rather Be a Clueless Fruit Or a Blind Date?
Fifteen: Why Throwing Poop Is Sometimes The Best Choice
Sixteen: Going Out With The Parents Is Such A Drag
Seventeen: Be Careful What You Fish For
Eighteen: Be Careful What You Curse For
Nineteen: A Farewell To (Doughy) Arms
Twenty: Punch To The Gut, And I’m To Blame
Twenty-One: The Soundproof Insulation Of Large Boobs
Twenty-Two: Stormy, Stormy Night
Twenty-Three: MILF’s, Meatballs & Mistakes
Twenty-Four: Greg Brady Learns His Limits
Twenty-Five: People With Dyke Sisters Shouldn’t Throw Stones
Twenty-Six: Every Day Is Gay Day
Twenty-Seven: She Shoots, She Scores!
Twenty-Eight: If a Lesbian Falls In The Woods, Does She Make a Sound?
Twenty-Nine: Nobody Wants To Talk About The Pink Labia In The Room
Thirty: Why Some Things Are Wrapped In Plastic
Thirty-One: Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner
Thirty-Two: Sometimes Your Best Insurance Is In Your Bra
Thirty-Three: Hoisting The Boobs For a Clearer View
Thirty-Four: When Your Ball Hits Your Thigh, Like a Big Pizza Pie . . .
Thirty-Five: Pasta, Pot, Pee & Me
Thirty-Six: Bang-Bang-Tap
A Note From The Author
One
The Long Haul Wasn’t Designed for a U-Haul
My sister’s voice always went through my head anytime I saw a fortune cookie, and I heard it now as I ate a stale one from the takeout scraps in my cupboard. “See, a vagina!” My sister Lisa saw vaginas everywhere she went. If she had been in my kitchen, she would have broken the fortune cookie in half, turned the triangle-shaped cookie wide end up, shoved it in my face and said, “See, a vagina!” I knew this too: no matter the mood I was in, she could crack me up.
Other vagina sightings ranged from the obvious flowers to a more obscure list that included: puffed rice cereal, pre-sliced hot dog buns, the Toyota logo, a Dorito, tacos, and several varieties of shellfish. When we were kids, she would trap a long, wide blade of grass vertically between her thumbs so she could blow into it to make a whistle, then at some point she should shove her spitty fingers into my face and say, “See, a vagina!”
Lisa always spotted the vaginas before I did—and she said this was my biggest problem. Sure, I could see the resemblance in a fortune cookie, but I maintained that the blade-of-grass-between-two-thumbs-whistle was stretching it just a bit. With my sister around, there was simply no way to hide a vagina, except maybe with her favorite pair of extra-large camouflage boxer shorts.
While Lisa chose camouflage as a fashion statement, there was never anything camouflaged about her preference for the fairer sex. My sister barreled out of the closet (knocking me down with the closet door she’d ripped off its hinges), proclaiming herself a lesbian just as I was starting to wonder about my own preferences. I was the gay tortoise; she was the queer rabbit. While I was secretly reading books in the library on a fact-finding quest after hopelessly falling in love with my straight best friend, Lisa left me in the dust, blazing by me in a friggin’ rainbow-colored Macy’s Thanksgiving Day float with a turbocharged engine.
The fortune cookie wasn’t the only reason I was thinking of my sister. Lisa had threatened to call any minute now, so what I really needed was Cheetos. And not the fake Cheddar Puffs Mom bought when we were kids, but the real deal. I tried to ignore the craving as I settled back on the couch, remembering how Mom would hide the generic Stop and Shop bag deep in the trash and pour the inferior puffs into a white ceramic bowl, thinking us kids wouldn’t know the difference.
“See,” Mom would say, “same orange stuff on your fingers,” then she would offer up the neon evidence as if they were the real thing. But Lisa and I noticed how the fake ones sat uncomfortably in the bowl, with much less of a dramatic curl, looking packed flat, like cheap Chinese food. And we noted the Orange No. 5 was off just a shade (was it Orange No. 6?) and that the color didn’t cling to your fingers in the same fluffy-fiber way, but more like thick war paint.
I wished I could spot a faux lesbo just as easily, and I thought of Lorn Elaine for the millionth time. The Actress, the ex. I knew she was never the real deal—or, that she wouldn’t let herself be because of her career, or, at least, that was the perfect excuse. The more distressing question was, What made me believe I could ever make her stay? From the very start, being with a woman did not sit easily with her. She, too, always sat uncomfortably in the bowl, and, in the end, she didn’t cling to my fingers nearly as long as I would have liked, and I ended up smeared in war paint.
I anticipated the phone ringing as I dozed on the couch, giving into the sudden nap attack, which was brought on by the exhausting prospect of heading out to the store to score that bag of electric orange carbs. After six long weeks without Lorn and my sister Lisa’s impending phone call, I hoped that when the phone rang I would be able to stifle the agonizing hope it was Lorn calling to tell me she was coming back. Maybe this would be the time I could hide my disappointment when I heard my sister’s voice (or any voice besides Lorn’s) and then my sister wouldn’t tease me, “Still waiting for The Actress, I see.”
I considered letting my answering machine take my sister’s call, but I couldn’t risk the chance it might be my brother, Vince. His check-in calls were fairly regular, and getting more frequent since he was having girl troubles of his own. Vince had been with Erica for almost as long has I had been with “The Actress”—as my sister and Vince’s girlfriend, Erica, called her.
I was in LA when I first met Erica, the woman who would become my brother’s girlfriend, and she had introduced herself as “Erica . . . as in All My Children,” and that nickname stuck for a while. I liked Erica’s cocky attitude and had introduced her to my brother, then congratulated myself at quite regular intervals on putting together the world’s most perfect straight couple. When I told Vince the unsurprising news that “The Actress” decided she could not be with a woman (again) and it was all over (again) and she was so sorry (again), Vince trumped me with his own news: Vince and Erica, the world’s most perfect couple, were also breaking up.
So, I did what any sister would do when presented with these facts: I blamed my brother for blowing the perfect couple I had created. He was mad at me for a week (evidence: he called me only twice). By the following week he’d resumed his normal pattern of calling every other day, eventually realizing it wasn’t my fault, since we all knew his track record with women had been spotty at best.
Before Erica, my sister and I could blame our brother’s failed relationships on his selection of The Barbie Doll of the Week. This time, it was my reputation on the line. I h
ad made this perfect couple, and he had blown it, big time. Erica and Vince were no more. My sister had been equally compassionate when I had called her to share my news about being dumped.
Lisa had said, “There’s something about straight girls you just can’t put your finger on . . .” and then she laughed and snorted for several minutes at her own joke.
I snapped back to reality when the phone rang and I opted to pick it up rather than hear my nauseatingly cheerful voice on the answering machine, since I was no longer that person. That person was sporting my pre-dumped voice.
“Hello?”
Lisa said, “Don’t get your panties in a twist, it’s just me,”
“Don’t be an ass, I’ve stopped thinking she’ll call,” I said.
“Liar.”
“Shut it,” I said.
Lisa said, “Don’t lose your sense of humor. You fucked a straight actress, she pulled an Ann Heche on your sorry ass, and you got dumped. Now scrape your friggin’ shoe and move on.”
I said, “Don’t pretend you didn’t like her.”
“Of course I liked Lorn, I like all women,” Lisa said. “That doesn’t mean I don’t know how to kick a dog to the curb if they piss on my leg and try to tell me it’s raining.”
“So what’s going on?” I said.
Unlike Vince, who always called about nothing, Lisa always called with some sort of news.
“Are you sitting down?” she asked.
“I’m lying down,” I said, already exhausted. I braced myself, because you never know with Lisa.
This could be the call our family all expected, the call from a prison in Maine for running an Italian restaurant out of her home with no permits to sell food or the gallons of homemade wine she calls “V.” She told Mom and Dad “V” stood for Vino, and then she forgot, and told them she named it after Vince, but the triangle-shape label was an obvious and familiar reference. Dad figured it out and would ask for a glass with pure delight, “Give me another shot of that V-jay-jay-juice!” When he got away with that in front of Mom, Dad switched it up to: “Sure am craving some more Vayjay-jay!”
Lisa said, “You may want to sit up for this. I’ve decided what I’m going to do with my share of grandma’s inheritance!”
“You mean the money you said you didn’t want because it would only bring pretentious and empty lives to all who touched it?”
“You and Vince haven’t spent my share, right?” she asked.
“No. Dad helped me set it up in a money market for you. He said you’d want it eventually. He’s known you a bit longer.” Lisa is two years older than me. “His actual words were: ‘Even an earthy-crunchy bulldyke from Maine can find a use for a few million dollars.’”
“Not from Maine anymore! Ready? Wanna guess?”
I didn’t.
“I’ve decided to buy a campground in Rhode Island, and you’re gonna help me run it!” She sang out this news with that typical “Ta-daaaaa” sound in her voice, waiting for applause.
“No,” I said.
“Marie, it’s gonna be great! Remember all the fun we used to have camping? The smell of the campfire and the pine trees—”
“I remember a giant hawk dismembering a baby bunny on a picnic table. We were too afraid it would go after us if we made a run for it, so we had to stand still and watch it eat the thing.”
Lisa laughed, “I tried to use the remains to get out of dissecting a frog in science, but, no go. Hey, remember all the cool nights by the campfires, the dappled sunshine through the trees, the chocolate and marshmallow s’mores, the hot dogs, the barbeque chicken—”
I said, “My stomach is still on the bunny, but I do remember that really creepy guy who hung around the campground and exposed himself every time we spun around the playground Round-A-Bout.”
“That was hysterical,” Lisa said.
“Not really.”
“You have to admit his timing was amazing. Hey, remember the nights hanging at the teen rec hall?”
“Yeah, except there were no teenagers, just a bunch of us nine- to twelve-year-olds hanging around trading crumpled Star Wars cards.”
“Mmmm, Princess Leia,” Lisa said. “Don’t forget, I got to touch my first boob while camping. Ahhhh, Jennifer Litwieller. I called her Jennifer Tit-Sweller after that, remember?”
“Yeah, she loved that,” I said.
“She only let me touch her once, but it never would have happened if our parents hadn’t taken us camping.”
Lisa had that Woodsy The Owl tone in her voice now, like she was teaching something important: Remember kids, your best chance to touch a boob before you turn twelve is behind a skanky teen rec hall while camping!
Lisa was on a roll. “And remember the time we made Vince pee right inside the rec hall because we didn’t want to leave all the fun to walk him to the bathrooms, then he ratted us out to Mom and Dad? And you tried your first cigarette, there too.”
I said, “Those are reasons enough to buy a campground.” I had thrown up from the cigarette and wiped the evidence off my mouth with a climbing ivy plant that turned out to be poison sumac. My lips burned for weeks. Good times.
Lisa continued with a irritating wistful high-pitched tone to her usually husky, matter-of-fact voice, “It’s a sweet little spot in the woods in southern Rhode Island, with 250 sites, a man-made pond, a few old cabins, but I plan to build some more, and a huge log recreation hall attached to a camp store. The website pictures look pristine. I told the woman I would have a deposit to her by the end of this week.”
“The website?” I said, sitting up, feeling the sharp grit of potato chip crumbs grind into my elbows. “You mean you haven’t even seen it?”
“Of course I saw it! I just told you, the pictures are sweet! There’s even a golf cart to make campfire wood deliveries! Oh, and in the back of the camp store, I might even put a gift shop.” By “gift shop,” I knew she meant “bar.” Anytime we ever went to a hotel she would scan the lobby and say, “Ooooh, look! A gift shop!” and make a beeline for the bar.
Lisa continued in her disturbing cheerfulness. “The owner was honest with me that the whole campground needs some updating, but I was glad to hear the buildings needed some work, since I want this to be a bit of a project, you know? Leave my mark on the place. It’ll be fun! The biggest thing is all the roofs need fixing or replacing, the electrical, too, maybe the plumbing, but, I have the perfect name to go after the dyke clientele.”
I said, “Well, it all makes sense now, I mean, since you already have the perfect name.”
Lisa shouted into my ear, “Camptown Ladies!”
Then she proceeded to screech her song into the phone:
“Camptown Ladies sing this song,
Dildo, Dildo!!!
Camptown Lezzies, eight inches long,
All the Dildo, Gaaaaaaay!”
Two
Camptown Ladies & Camp, Camp
Lisa had rented a three-bedroom condo for us to share, one town away from the campground, and I was once again reminded how simple it was to make life-changing decisions when you are wealthy. She had done a good job with the condo, aside from the freakishly décor-free environment in the living area downstairs, bare except for a wide screen TV and huge couch to watch Patriots football. The only other sign of life was in the kitchen, which was fully stocked with Italian cooking supplies, and the largest set of chef grade cooking pans available in the free world.
Vince and I were both in such dire need of a distraction, we would have agreed to any of one of Lisa’s wild ideas, and within two weeks, Vince had hired a realtor to sublet his California apartment, placed all his things in storage, and I had closed up my own house in the Hollywood Hills. We were running late and Lisa had planned to meet us at the camp but still my brother and I wasted ten minutes to rock, paper, and scissor our way into getting our rooms decided (we played six rounds until he finally got his way).
Now I was in a condo in Rhode Island, showered and changed, my clothes a
ll put away, and I was waiting outside for Vince. My brother could take longer than a teenage girl to go anywhere. As I waited, I thought about how perfect Erica had been for him. She was smart and strong, and she met his strict “knock-out” requirement. She was so strong, that when we first met, I didn’t doubt for a moment she was a lesbian. OK, it was mainly since Erica had advertised her contractor and decorating company in the Pink Pages to get gay clientele. Erica turned out to be an ace contractor and carpenter, who, despite her petite size six frame, could work side by side with a crew of three to sledgehammer down a non-load bearing wall in a matter of minutes. When I found out about her strategy to get gay clients, I accused her of being a “Thespian” (a straight chick acting gay)—and I realized in many ways she was the complete opposite of my now ex-girlfriend, the re-closeted actress Lorn Elaine, who had made a career of pretending to be straight.
Erica and I had formed an unlikely business partnership when I first moved out to California, one that was built from hiring her due to my extreme boredom and my inheritance of a ridiculous amount of money from my dead grandmother, which made boredom affordable. Erica certainly didn’t agree to work with me from any skill I had that she lacked. I was basically her chief bottle-washer; assistant of all things needing to be nailed (Lisa would say, except women). Most often I was what Erica called her Homo-Depot runner.
I laughed at this memory as I kicked the tires of my old car to see if they were still up for the ride after all this time stored in Dad’s garage. Lisa had coordinated getting the car over to the condo for me.
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