by Méira Cook
His head was the same place that he imagined his precisely honed squad of Oompa-Loompas, his ninja cleaners, his crack team of glinty-eyed janitorial staff. In fact, his cleaning crew was composed of a couple of counsellors so strapped for cash that they were willing to stay behind and close up shop. Mostly, though, the burden of camp cleanup fell to good old reliable Nathan. If Nathan had a fatal flaw it was his hankering for the picturesque and his improbable love of Hollywood musicals.
The walls of cabin #3 had been whitewashed so often they were half an inch thicker than they’d once been. All the cabins were like that, their walls growing inwards by increments, year after year. Late at night in his camp director’s cabin, after he’d talked to his section heads, after he’d reviewed the day and planned the next, after he’d made his lists and assigned his duties, after he’d texted his girlfriend to say goodnight (phone reception on the island was so poor they’d been forced into an epistolary relationship), Nathan would click off his desk lamp and watch the window-framed rectangle of night sky jump into the room. At moments like this — the darkness both near and far, within and outside — he could almost reach out his hand and skim the cluster of boys’ cabins huddled to one side of the dining hall.
The darkness thickening in his living room was full of the sound of frogs coughing up their green phlegm. It was possible that Nathan was growing fanciful. His girlfriend hardly ever wrote back anymore. “I’m not a narrative girl,” she explained.
The lights of the cabins were doused and the campers were sleeping, sleeping and dreaming, dreaming and growing and flourishing like weeds in the vitamin D–enriched sunlight and scattered showers necessary to turn earth to grass and boys to men. Mostly not, though. Mostly the grass was trampled to mud-splatter by the feet of these boys — running, kicking, cavorting — and the boys themselves tended to turn wavy and grow younger as the weeks passed, as if they were flashbacks to some earlier summer. Jump cut versions of their younger selves captured on an eight-track home movie. The sun stopped in its course and ran backward.
Nathan was pushing forty and forty was pushing back with the strength of conviction. He was the only adult man at sleep-away camp, and he hadn’t had sex for going on twelve weeks although he’d been on the island for eight.
The not having sex didn’t bother him. There was too much of it about anyway. The air swarmed with pheromone musk, the fried onion stink of boiling armpits, the ammonia chlorine of wet dreams. He didn’t know what the girls’ cabins smelled like. Bubblegum lip gloss, he hoped. Strawberry shampoo and cedar hope chests.
Nathan’s girlfriend always seemed to smell of garlic. It was a mystery, yet another one. Either she chewed a couple of cloves for breakfast every morning or she rubbed raw garlic behind her ears. She was his yeasty Italian loaf, his fragrant girl-shaped pizza. Or perhaps it was only a vampire thing — she’d always been a girl who took precautions. Once, back in the city, he’d discovered her on his bed, her knees drawn up, tears streaming from her eyes. “Burns,” she’d moaned. Was her soul in mortal danger? Was her heart aflame? No, it was just a garlic clove she’d pushed inside herself to cure a yeast infection. Perhaps the infection explained the rising bread smell he’d been noticing. He crouched on his knees between her legs, sniffing the warm, doughy folds of her vagina as he tried to pry out the clove.
Vagina was not the word Nathan’s girlfriend had used. Her name was Riva and she disliked prevarication. “Stop fiddling around with your fingers and suck me, you cunt!” she’d snapped.
The problem with whitewashing the cabin walls, as the two-man cleanup crew pointed out to Nathan, was that the words and their illustrations were indelible. Within hours of rolling on an undercoat, they would rise to the surface again, faintly perhaps but still legible. Someone had made Morgan Dejardins cum three times, cum all over herself; someone else had screwed your mother till her tits fell off; and Jason would love Brianna forever.
There was some contention about the identity of the reigning BJ Queen. “Sami Fisher?” one graffitist wondered, but another maintained that Mikey Koslov sucked dick for free. Nathan was intrigued at the implication that dick-sucking had become a potentially profitable camp activity but couldn’t help admiring the ingenuity of the interrogation mark after Sami Fisher’s name. It seemed to bespeak an unexpected curiosity, a willingness to put forward a hypothesis that might later, and violently, be refuted. Mainly, though, the scrawls consisted of one- or two-word variations upon a fairly specific theme. Obscenity was the lingua franca of these cabin walls; it penetrated deep as the studs that held the wooden frame in place.
Nathan had a fantasy that over the winter months the gossip and prurience that underwrote the walls would rise once more to the surface until, come summer, the campers would be welcomed back by the quaint poems of yesteryear. “Hannah fucks / Anna sucks” and “Ookie Ookie / Who ate the Cookie?”
He was still thinking about kids getting sex wrong. Pleasantly dumbfounded. A girl couldn’t cum all over herself, even three times. And no matter how hard you screwed someone’s mother, her tits, almost certainly, would not fall off. It was endearing in its way, which way was neither innocent nor experienced.
And not exactly innocent or guilty, either, thought Nathan, jiggling his non-existent change in his pockets. He rocked back on his heels, shook his head, and whistled. Hoo wee, these kids.
Behind him, his maintenance crew was horsing around. The launch was picking up the three of them at six o’clock and the island had to be trig by then. Neat and self-contained as a nut in its polished shell. At the moment, though, Hunter was flicking whitewash at Newman and Newman was squealing like a girl and then, hearing himself, his treble shriek, he smartened up and merely pretended to squeal like a girl. Newman had a slight build and pitchy vocals; he couldn’t be too careful.
“Who ate the cookie?” Hunter read aloud. “Man, are they still looking for that damn cookie?”
“Darn cookie,” he corrected himself, but Nathan just shrugged. Camp was over. He was off the clock.
Hunter and Newman began reminiscing about cookies past. They’d all been duped by the cookie. It was an ancient summer tradition, a squeamish rite of passage at Camp Beaver, and probably every other camp throughout the thousands of islands and inlets that made up Lake of the Woods. And possibly the World, the Galaxy, the Universe (bottom right quadrant of cabin #3’s palimpsest of wonder and solipsism). Islands past had had their donkey’s ears, their ticking crocodiles, their Man Fridays, their conch shells, but Pleasure Island was all about the cookie.
As a boy, Nathan had attended this same summer camp where, in the very first week — homesick, dizzy, full of non-specific yearning — he’d been introduced to Ookie Cookie, a game in which adolescent grossness combined with Sesame Street nostalgia. A plate of lust with a glass of milk to wash it down. Daring in conception, prosaic in execution, the game involved a group of boys standing in a circle with a cookie in the centre. Nathan had heard of, but naturally never participated in, a jerk circle: a ring of engorged boys in someone’s parent’s basement, drawing their weapons, pounding their puddings, counting down from twenty-five. The one who bull’s-eyed the cookie last had to eat it.
If you thought about it, which in the intervening years Nathan had certainly done, the game was the perfect adolescent antidote to fledgling fears of premature ejaculation. The game was about cumming, cumming fast. The boys in Nathan’s cabin had called it a jerk’s circle.
“Ready boys?” Nathan turned to his work crew. He grabbed a roller and began slathering whitewash across the wall in unseemly streaks. Hunter glanced at Newman. They’d planned to scrub down the walls first but if Nate wanted to cut their work in half that was the dude’s prerogative.
The rhythmic sine waves of mindless labour, the boysy attar of sunscreen and bug spray, unwashed socks and slightly mildewed bedding, put Nathan in mind of Camp Beaver, circa 1986. He’d been a scrawny kid with a no
se his mother had assured him he would one day grow into, “the family nose.” Perpetually wrong footed, off balance, and skittish, he was envious of the casual intimacy everyone else seemed to share — boys and girls, campers and counsellors, humans and nature.
The guys in his cabin liked to talk about the legendary zombies that roamed the island, the anticipation of Saturday night burgers, and sex. Mostly sex. Many professed an acquaintance with breasts, even nipples. Danny Rubin, a big shot even then, claimed that he’d once persuaded a “hot chick” to sit on his face, and allowed that things would have gotten “out of control” if he hadn’t suffered an asthma attack, which necessitated exchanging the girl for an inhaler. The other inhabitants of cabin #3 vigorously debated the probability of Danny’s being a son of a bitch bastard liar but Nathan caught a whiff of the collective musk of their envy, since it so perfectly matched his own. The ability to manufacture such an unlikely Playboy scenario and then relate it with unblinking conviction impressed his listeners as an end in itself. Good work, Danny! Better luck next time.
The assorted misadventures of Nathan’s first summer at camp included poison ivy, impetigo, a virulent strain of pink eye — possibly exacerbated by bleach in the eye (a cleaning mishap) — a likely wood tick infection, sunburn, heatstroke.
“Nice move, McFly,” said his frustrated counsellor the third time he’d had to escort the boy to the infirmary. Everyone at camp, it seemed to Nathan, had seen Back to the Future, the previous summer’s hit movie. Everyone but him. However, he was not excluded from the famous Camp Beaver Taco Debacle — delicious going down but not, alas, staying down — so there was that. There were so many ways of being excluded, of failing to fit in, that he was absurdly grateful even for the stomach cramps and painful diarrhea that followed. A shared adventure, a bonding experience! In between his various afflictions, Nathan learned to swim in the lake, he successfully completed the ropes course, he had his first crush. A mixed bag.
Molly Leibowitz was her name, she of the beguilingly inward-turned toes, a physical quirk that he imbued with all manner of esoteric meanings. She was shy, she liked him, she was dying of some mysterious pigeon toe–related ailment, she like liked him. Also, and in tandem with all of the above, she secretly hated him. Although why the secrecy? he would later wonder. There were plenty of girls who hated him to his face, who were not shy in proclaiming their aversion to Nathan Miller, that stupid little diaper baby mama’s boy.
During rousing games of Capture the Flag, Molly would sit on the sidelines with her friend, Leah Silverstein, shouting girlish encouragements that Nathan pretended were directed at him. While waiting for his teammates to free him from jail (“Nice move, McFly”), he would dream of infiltrating the opposition’s territory and singlehandedly capturing the flag while savagely tagging opposing players. He could spend entire afternoons hovering at the edges, frozen in place, his mind so full of heroic deeds that actual combat seemed incidental. It was his Walter Mitty period.
“Why don’t you ask her to the Saturday night dance?” Danny Rubin asked. The boys of cabin #3 had been wrangling over who was hotter, Melanie Kaplan or Rose Epstein, a good-natured pre-lights-out squabble that had developed into a semi-hostile analysis of competing baseball metaphors. Fourth base was going all the way, “Doing it,” a home run, Michael Shayowitz insisted — there was no such thing as fifth base. But Danny Rubin claimed the existence of a hitherto unimagined base, a fifth base, and even expressed incredulity that the other guys were so clueless.
“Haven’t you ever heard of the dugout?” he asked slyly. Cabin #3 erupted in the kind of prolonged hysteria that relied on energy rather than assurance and which lasted fully five minutes, petering out only when each boy had convinced himself that his stellar performance — slapping hand to head and falling over backward, laughing until the tears came, begging for mercy — had convinced the others. Convinced them of what? Nathan didn’t have a clue.
“Yeah, yeah,” Danny finally allowed. “You’re all dugout champs.” That was when he asked Nathan why the hell he didn’t invite Molly Leibowitz to the dance Saturday night. “Hey, maybe she’s your density,” he offered, a mot juste that so delighted the boys that it was some time before anyone could draw breath, after which their counsellor stormed in to say, “Shut the eff up, morons, it’s lights out.”
It was a quote, Nathan realized, another quote from a comic book he hadn’t read or a movie he hadn’t seen. A boyhood he had no idea how to live and a life that he suspected would offer the same endless opportunities to sit on the sidelines, dreaming, when all around him his compatriots were capturing the flag and getting the girl and winning the glory. From Nathan’s perspective there was no hope of redemption because however much he grew, however much taller and older and wiser he got, there was no way to go back and rescue the wretched kid he’d been.
Yet although he suffered indignities that first summer, Nathan was no longer the small, wobbly creature who’d boarded the camp bus and stared out of the window for the next two hours and 210 kilometres. He had been assigned a cabin, and although runty, lacking in coordination, and inclined to inexplicable rashes, he’d become part of a group, a member of a team, a red T-shirt during the colour wars and the lower half of a cabin #3 bunk bed. He was lousy at sports and unlearned in the knockabout ways of thirteen-year-old boys. He upended every canoe he tried to paddle and had to be rescued from the cabin’s traditional, forbidden midnight swim to a nearby island, but he was a cabin #3 boy and they were stuck with him.
During the summer of ’86 his world contracted to the rocky configurations of Beaver Island and it was difficult to imagine any other world. Indeed, so profound was his sense of isolation that he failed to write even one letter home despite the five crisp, stamped, and self-addressed envelopes his mother had carefully packed in the webbing of his duffle bag.
“Dear Parents,” he had scrawled on the first page of his stationery pad, “We had tacos last night. They were wonderful and terrible.”
That was all. He could barely comprehend his experiences, let alone write about them.
In the end he didn’t ask Molly Leibowitz to the dance. She was out of his league. A delicate girl with long, piano player’s fingers (she was a prodigy, it was well-known, destined for greatness), she wore her hair in a dark, shiny ponytail pulled high so as to reveal her slender, breakable neck.
“Why don’t you make like a tree and get out of here?” Leah Silverstein would taunt whenever she caught him staring at the girl. Sometimes she yelled, “Get a room, why don’t you. For yourself!” It was a jibe that made as little sense as the one about the tree, although the contempt behind both insults was genuine. Even at that age, it seemed, he had been compelled to parse the logic behind motiveless teenage derision.
Leah and Molly were best friends, seldom out of each other’s company. They made an odd couple, one girl slender and delicate, the other sturdy and indelicate. Everyone called them the Rocky and Bullwinkle of Camp Beaver, which did nothing to sweeten Leah’s disposition.
“Hey dickhead,” she’d call after Nathan, call loud enough for everyone to hear. “Have you eaten any cookies lately?”
Everyone in the canteen heard (it was lunch time), everyone laughed (maybe not Molly, he couldn’t bring himself to look), and the laughter was raucous and convulsive and prolonged. It was the kind of laughter that said: Better you than me, sport. The kind that fully acknowledged that there but for the grace of God went some other fellow.
“Hey, don’t worry about that dyke,” Danny comforted him. “She’s in love with Leibowitz. Everybody knows. Not that she’ll get anywhere with her,” he added after an uncharacteristically reflective pause. “’Cause your girlfriend’s a frigid little bitch. Everybody knows.”
Once again, the vast chasm between what everybody knew and what Nathan demonstrably did not know seemed insurmountable. One thing Nathan knew, however, was that Danny had laughed at Lea
h Silverstein’s taunt. Laughed so hard, in fact, that he’d swallowed his hot dog the wrong way and ended up snorting ketchup from his nose.
The cookie was ubiquitous that summer. It had not yet acquired its rhyming nickname. It was just the cookie, sometimes chocolate chip, sometimes oatmeal raisin. Most of the cabin #3 boys claimed to have taken part in a cookie jerk, although no one would admit to being the first to cross the finish line, who knew why. Some misplaced notion of sexual endurance, perhaps. Coming last, cum-ing last, was no great honour either, all your splattered pals wiping their hands on their jeans and watching your clench-fisted, red-faced huffing. And then there was the matter of eating the damn cookie afterward. No, the trick was to aim for middle place in the Great Cookie Cum, said Danny Rubin. Sometimes being part of the crowd had its advantages.
Being part of the crowd was, in fact, essential. Although the present incarnation of Camp Beaver was inclusive, all faiths welcome, even those of little faith, even atheists, Nathan’s Camp Beaver had been a Jewish summer camp although not, in theory, exclusively so. That year a gentile boy had taken up residence in cabin #3, a boy identical in all particulars to the other boys — grubby, boastful, happy-go-lucky, tough. Nevertheless the rumour grew, and persisted, that Blaine Richardson had never been circumcised. It was such an outrageous claim that it just might have been true. Certainly the boy never took part in the endless cookie debates, nor did he volunteer for the great dick measure off, five of the boys lining themselves up along a notched stick. Clearly he had something to hide, a concealment made more conspicuous by the fact that he showered in his bathing trunks and wriggled into his pajamas under cover of a beach towel.
How had it shaken out? Did the counsellors dunk young Blaine in the cold lake so he’d have to strip naked right there on the dock? Did the boys ambush him in the toilet cubicles and pants him? Had one of the slutty girls invited him to the beach one night for a make-out session that would conclusively address the problem at hand? Such hijinks had been endlessly discussed, meticulously planned, dates and times had been set. But in the end nothing happened. Blaine Richardson had departed Camp Beaver at the end of the summer, his modesty intact. Perhaps it had been too hot, too humid, too lazy to work up the necessary investigative zeal. And it was always possible that the boys had matured a little — by the end of the summer they had decided that a man’s cowl-necked dick was his own business, best left unprovoked.