Up Up, Down Down

by Cheston Knapp

  “What are you doing here?” he asks, only emphasizing the “here,” and not the “you,” so I know he’s not trying to be snide. I know I have, in part, paid him for this solicitude, but it feels genuine nonetheless, like it comes from Jamie’s abiding love for skateboarding.

  “Fakie frontside flips,” I say.

  “Sick! I love that trick. Let me know if you need any help.”

  And as he rides off to help other campers, I understand the inadequacy of my response—I know I’ve only partially answered his question.

  X.

  Because but really, what am I doing here? While I know Jamie didn’t mean it to, his question pops something of a bubble in me. It calls back that agenbite of inwit, the stab of self-consciousness. When I signed up for camp, I believed that this little bit of adventure tourism would prove abreactive. Confronting what had been making me nostalgic would help me shore up my shaky sense of self, clarify my relationship to my past, and, in so doing, help me lean into the future as if it were a headwind. Of all the identities I’ve ever assumed—basketball-tennis-soccer kid, lax bro, son, brother, Christian, emotard, Virginian, frat boy, poet (briefly), lover (often very briefly), editor, husband, writer, etc.—that of skater said the most about me. By that I think I mean that it created the least amount of dissonance between how other people knew me and how I knew myself. Call me naive or fatuous but I wanted a taste of that simplicity again. To cut through my life’s noise and live more authentically. Except as the heady thrill of meeting a few new people and getting some tricks back wears off, the specter of irreality I was trying to escape begins to edge back in, to stalk the back alleys of my brain like the noirish and ghostly clouds of fog you find pouring from city manholes. The possibilities for the week begin to settle into the reality of it and I grow less and less sure of myself as it wears on. And this lends to the rest of my time at Session 2 the experiential quality of my nostalgia, that is, the aqueous wash of dreams.

  Routine takes swift and firm hold of our days, blurring them into a running stock ticker of experience. In the morning, James barges into our rooms to wake us, a deranged muezzin, heavy metal playing at full blast in the lounge. This is meant to amp us up, I know, to get us stoked for the day ahead, but I find it much darker and more menacing than that. I am generally so sore upon waking that my body feels alien to me. My back and quads sing out like rusty hinges. And my groin—it’s like I’ve given birth in the night. I take ibuprofen and apply liberal palmfuls of IcyHot jelly and yet still I have to take little Andre Agassi steps to avoid the pain. Every morning I’m convinced the other campers figure me for the source of the mentholated cloud hovering in the Hesh.

  At brekkie one morning, I find the table of adults full and take a seat at an empty four-top whose red-checkered vinyl tablecloth is sticky and flecked with other campers’ fugitive food. Three kids promptly join me. They’re maybe seven or eight years old and each presents an adorable sleepy mien. Their hair is mussed into cute cowlicks. Crusty patches of dried drool spot their cheeks like wadis. Their feet dangle from the chairs and I almost encourage them to remember how that feels. One of them props himself up on his elbows and sits on his knees. This is something, I think. But what, I don’t know. Maybe it’s an amuse-bouche of fatherly delights to come, part of some as-yet-inscrutable typology of my life. Will I one day take a like and simple pleasure in the residue of sleep on the faces of my wee tykes? Did Dad delight in such residues when my brothers and I were wee, when we were all a we? After a moment a fourth kid appears at the table’s side, by my chair. His face is a command phrased as a question and I understand he’s shaking me down. “Oh, did you want to sit here?” I ask, and he nods his head, slowly, yes. And although this fourth kid is the least cute of the bunch, his hair a shade of blond that time will surely turn dark, I laugh and give up my seat and finish my powder eggs and Cheerios standing by the bus tub Wally will gather later.

  Because of the soreness, I tend to take a pass on the day’s first skatepark and spend my a.m. time on the sidelines, alternately watching the others and reading. “Are you a man entitled to wish for a child? Are you the victorious one, the self-conqueror, the commander of your senses, the master of your virtues? This I ask you. Or is it the animal and need that speak out of your wish? Or loneliness? Or lack of peace with yourself?” Most of the teens skate with earbuds in, listening to music, sealed off in their private worlds. If we’d had the option, I’m sure my friends and I would’ve done the same when we were growing up, but we didn’t, which qualifies me to judge this as a lesser way of engaging with the spart. It cheats the communal aspect of skateboarding. Why not bring a boom box? Have everyone listen to the same tunes? But what it practically amounts to is that I’m really only able to get any social traction with Jamie. I sit shotgun as he ferries us from campus to park to park and back again. Our conversations build upon one another, the next broader and deeper than the last, and it comes to seem like an organic thing is emerging between us, a fragile little shoot of a friendship maybe.

  By day two the olfactory situation in the Yellow Room is positively fugged up. So quickly does it achieve peak dankness that I’m convinced it must live in the walls in some diluted form, a spider cell of noxiousness, years of fart-stink and foot-stink and behind-the-ears-on-a-hot-day stink waiting to be released or activated by some sympathetic agent. One evening early on Pat enters limping, an ice pack wrapped around his right knee. After it becomes clear he’s not going to offer up any information gratis, I ask what happened. He says he tweaked it that afternoon on his way to winning the camp-wide rail jam and that he’s going to get it checked out in the morning. There hangs about Pat that modality of loneliness peculiar to late teens, an air of mild dejection and confusion that makes you want to care for them in exactly the sorts of ways they’d resent. I come to think of him as a representative of my younger self, a Scrooge-like vision of Cheston Past. Maybe he is here to help me learn to accept and even love those parts of myself that I’ve been trying so hard to annihilate. It comes out that this is not Pat’s first time at Windells. It’s not his second, either, but his third. His first two trips were cut short by injuries. Last year, right after orientation, but two hours into the first day, he took a hard fall while dicking around on the Ranch and broke a leg.

  “Those dry slopes are gnarly,” he says with the affectless air of a stoic. “I mean it. They’ll fuck you up.”

  “This place is snakebit for you,” I say.

  “I guess,” he says. “We read some of that for school,” he adds, pointing to my book.

  I clam up.

  Is this what’s commonly referred to as a “teaching moment”? Should I be giving him some pointers, other philosophers to read? He’s read more Nietzsche than I had at his age, after all. In my Christian days, I would’ve referred to this as witnessing. “Have you heard about this pretty tight philosopher named Camus? Nothing’s sicker than The Plague.” But the silence goes on too long for me to say anything else and if there has been a moment here, I miss it. He pulls out his computer and puts on headphones that soon begin their noise-canceling tintinnabulation. By the time I return to campus the next afternoon, he is gone. Thrice booted early from this cursed place.

  After dodgeball, our nights in the lounge area take on the texture of time-lapse footage. People switch positions on the couches or stand to play pool or leave to piss or get another drink. It’s been so long since I’ve hung out in quite this way that I often wonder whether I’m doing it right.

  “Who brought the Cheez-Its?” Mitch asks the one night he stays in the house. Thanks to a miscue on my part, we’re sitting next to each other on the couch.

  “That was me,” I say, a little bashfully. I’ve been secretly hoping Facundo or James would be the first to remark upon the booty I’ve brought.

  Sparrow introduces the house to booty of a different sort, a new dating app called Tinder. When housebound, Sparrow is more or less always shirtless. Following the arc of his rib cage i
s the word “Nesta,” which a quick search, refined for relevance, tells me was Bob Marley’s real first name. It means “messenger.” In the flats below the Jockey’s Ridges of his obliques, he has tattoos of the Volcom diamond. To clarify, there is one on either side. Two Volcom diamond tattoos. The genius of the app, so far as I can discern from his description, is that it adopts the compulsive fuckability-indexing of Hot or Not and makes it actionable. In preparation for Thursday’s night out in Portland, Sparrow has set the radar’s range to max and established connections with over fifty girls. How has he managed to write so many messages? Easy. He’s written one flirty note and copied and pasted it to every single girl like it’s some heat-seeking missile. We’re all a little awed by this. I’m overcome with a combination of respect and revulsion. The self-assured grin on his face says it all: “Don’t hate the player, hate the game.”

  Mitch turns to me and shares an app he likes and finds useful. Maybe I’ll like it and find it useful, too? It organizes your grocery shopping.

  “See, your wife can put something in on the computer or her phone and you see that here,” he says. He indicates a checklist on his screen. The first item is “Nausea Pops” and I quickly avert my eyes, wishing I could unsee that, and try to change the subject.

  The night we’re ousted from the dodgeball tournament by a cabin of teenagers, we watch a documentary called Bones Brigade: An Autobiography. It’s about the eponymous skate team, history’s most famous—Tommy Guerrero, Mike McGill, Lance Mountain, Steve Caballero, Rodney Mullen, and, of course, Tony Hawk. Directed by Stacy Peralta, the team’s manager (and he’s superkeen on reminding you of that), the movie is gooey thick with nostalgia and unabashedly so. As the story of the team’s dissolution approaches, some of the skaters start wiping tears from their eyes. Lance Mountain up and weeps. And despite Peralta’s self-aggrandizing and smarmy direction, this is enough to sink a fellow nostalgist. I excuse myself to the kitchen under the auspices of getting another beer. I cool myself in the open fridge and try to stifle my tears, chiding myself for being such a big softie.

  Wednesday morning Jamie shows up outside the Hesh, limping. After yesterday’s session, he woke up with such terrible pain in his feet that he’s going to see a doctor.

  “It’s a bummer,” he says. “But I’ll be all right. Rip it up today!”

  Without him there, I’m bumped to the back of the van. We’re going to a park over the mountain. I’ve made a judgment call and have not told the two coach-counselors that I sometimes get carsick. They play Black Sabbath and The Cramps so loud that even the teenagers behind me start to complain. “Can you turn it down a little?” they ask. “I can’t hear my music through my headphones,” one says. They either don’t hear them or else act like they don’t—either way the music stays. It starts to feel like it’s coming from under my skin, peeling me away from myself from the inside out. When we finally arrive at the park I’m dizzy and my proprioception is off in such a way that my body feels like it was drawn by a five-year-old. I ride around the park, trying to warm up my legs, fully convinced that the week has conspired to isolate me, that it has systematically removed the people I could talk to and therefore forced me to talk only to myself. I start to think that maybe the punctuation on the Windells sign isn’t wrong after all. Maybe this is the quote-unquote funnest place on earth.

  XI.

  Rain Thursday disrupts the routine. The sky’s tenebrous and spooky ectoplasmic clouds are caught in the trees behind campus. Highway 26 appears to be boiling. Scuttlebutt at breakfast among the winter-garbed is that the mountain’s a mess. The slope cams relay shrouded views and you can’t see shit. Jamie is on crutches—doctor says it’s bone spurs, that he’ll need surgery to fix them. There won’t be any skating today, either, he says. It’s raining the state over—on Doppler radar, Oregon looks like it’s been colonized by moss. Camp has contingency plans in place for situations like this, though, and I return to the Adult House to help decide on ours.

  We sit around the lounge and enact an experiment in true democracy. Options are presented, pros and cons debated. We vote. In the end, votes for the indoor water park in McMinnville come out six to one. James says we’ll head right into Portland from there, so we should be packing for the night, too.

  Eighty-five percent of our crew is practically agog, while I, the remaining fifteen percent, am hesitant, a little skeptical. I get to wondering whether my suspicion of fun has been learned, a leeriness adopted as a defense mechanism against a culture in which those people who seem to be having the most fun are the same people who are always trying to sell me some version of it; or whether, as I’ve feared since I learned the word, I actually suffer from anhedonia, which is the inability to find pleasure in typically pleasurable things. This is a thought that keeps me up nights. Am I an incorrigible fussbudget? A chronic fuddy-duddy? Is my blanket henceforth doomed to remain wet? Regardless, the people have spoken, a plan is in place, and I will fall in line. As I choose which of my remaining clean T-shirts to stuff in my backpack, a new smell wafts in through the Yellow Room’s open window: the rich oleaginousness of some choice domestic doja. It’s ten o’clock in the morning. The day brims with promise.

  McMinnville’s an hour and a half away and I sit shotgun up by James. He’s texted with Mitch, who didn’t come out to campus because of the weather. He’s decided to spend the day with his wife and her family.

  “I think he feels too old for the water park,” James says.

  “His loss,” I say, following what I intuit to be the script.

  There’s a cooler tucked in the space behind the front seats. It holds energy drinks and beers and Four Lokos, a soon-to-be-illegal energy drink–cum–malt beverage that is the crew’s a.m. potation of choice. Two other counselors have also joined us, off-duty because of the rain, and there is much sportive jesting during the drive about the possibilities for the night. With each passing day, Sparrow has refined his campaign on Tinder, fishing the considerable pond of girls he’s connected with, trying to suss out whether there is actual intent behind their flirting. He, of course, is one big walking intention. Facundo has borrowed my phone to text with a girl he met at a music festival and who lives in Portland. He is tight-lipped and bashful about their history together in a way I find winning, particularly juxtaposed with Sparrow’s carpet bombing. I know I probably shouldn’t, but I secretly read all their texts anyway and as we pass my phone back and forth I start to feel like the Cyrano de Bergerac of the Information Age. Wednesday night Facundo writes,

  “Hey Kate! I’m Chino . . . tomorrow with the crew of Windells we are going to eat some sushi and hit some bars at Portland, may be we can meet somewhere, that’s ok? Text me to this number.”

  Chino? Had I missed something? Had he, like me in my Gap days, once been a khaki maven? When he has not heard back by morning, he writes,

  “Kate it’s chino again, when you read this message text me here or Facebook, we should meet tonight at downtown Portland.”

  As we pull off the highway in McMinnville, she texts back asking for our plans.

  “We are going first to the us store, at 8 we have reservations at the sushi. 11 we are going to the area of voodoo doughnuts to hit some bars for 25 minutes and then to casa diablo.”

  She works late but will try to meet us. They promise to keep in touch via text. Facundo tries to hide his smile. And even my heart sets to pitter-pattering a tad.

  Deeper into primo Oregon wine country and rain’s off in the distance in every direction, but here the sun is out and seems bound to the earth by diaphanous ribbons of light fragile as haikus. We pass estimable travel-brochure views of the vineyards, rows and rows of vines laid out like a maze for the mentally infirm. Around a bend and we spot the water park. You can’t miss it. Evergreen Wings & Waves shares a plot with the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum, whose collection includes, most famously, the Spruce Goose, Howard Hughes’s mammoth wooden airplane. Does this not typify America? I wonder as we pull up.
This nostalgia for the colossal failures of our hyperrich? This memorializing of pure ambition? The water park itself has been made to fit the museum’s aeronautical theme. Perched on the roof and incorporated into the structure of the building is a 747. Not a replica or model, but an actual plane, a plane that once actually flew. The cabin has been gutted and retrofitted with four tubular and tentacular slides: “Sonic Boom,” “Tail Spin,” “Nose Dive,” and “Mach 1.” This I know from the website I looked up on my phone when curiosity overcame me and I wanted a better sense of what I’d gotten myself into.

  We park and the guys finish what’s left of their second or third Lokos and we collect our gear. Before we get to the entrance, we seem to pass through a permeable membrane of chlorine, an ammoniac field that only intensifies inside and that recalls the summer days I spent at our little neighborhood pool as a kid. The air is heavy, humid. It makes you aware of the fact that you’re breathing and so induces a low-level claustrophobia in those thus disposed. And the noise. Imagine the noise Twitter would make if indeed Twitter could make actual noise. Imagine a cartoon devil’s collections of souls—it’s a literal Pandemonium in here. Over the Top 40 tunes piped through the place by speakers I cannot see, shrill peals of delight and terror echo endlessly. You can’t tell where they’re coming from, fore or aft. Meanwhile the wave pool issues a salvo of beachy sound effects. A giant bucket perched atop a forest-themed jungle gym that’s reminiscent of the Swiss Family Robinson tips and three hundred gallons of water hit the ground with concussive force—two teenage guys stand below it and brace against the impact. The blue and yellow and green and orange slides spiral like silly straws out from the belly of the 747. Even this simple and stationary recon of the park, laid out like a giant Rube Goldberg device, sets the kettledrum of dread beating inside me.