This was before that fucking Tiny House Hunters show on HGTV fetishized the idea of living in a cardboard box. No offense to people who live in cardboard boxes, but I prefer to sleep in a bed that’s more than twelve inches away from the toilet, and I resent the entire Home and Gardens Television network for suggesting I should want otherwise.
So one weekend, my mom, dad, brother, and I drove for what felt like an entire day to get to Sue’s camper in Wisconsin (I’m sure it was only four hours, possibly less), and parked in a campground near a lake. I remember the excitement I felt when I got out of the car and the immediate disappointment I felt when I saw where we had parked.
The “campground” was nothing more than a patch of dirt no larger than a strip mall parking lot, next to a lake so overrun with tree roots and algae, you could barely tell where the shore ended and the water began. Even if you wanted to jump in, there’d be no way to return without climbing through bushes and muck.
You’d think, as an infant, I wouldn’t have had the worldly experience to distinguish a bad outdoors experience from a good one. But I knew this was shit. “At least there’s a swimming pool on the campground,” my mother tried to assure us. But when we walked by the pool to investigate, we discovered a hole full of green, cloudy water and a single used diaper floating listlessly in the center, crushing all of my hopes and dreams.
When we got inside the camper to clean up after our daylong journey to Wisconsin, we discovered that the water supply along this particular lake was apparently high in hydrogen sulfide gas, causing what is otherwise known as “sulfur water,” or water that smells like someone shit out a dozen deviled eggs and then sprayed it with the blood of a dozen other deviled eggs that had been freshly killed earlier that morning.
They say smell can be the strongest trigger for memory, which is perhaps why I remember this weekend so vividly over two decades later. Because it smelled like death the entire time.
Honestly, I don’t remember why we didn’t turn right around and drive back that minute. I’m sure I used my limited vocabulary to advocate for that very action. But being an RVer means never saying no to a challenge, so apparently we spent an entire weekend bathing in boiled egg water and just dealing with it. I asked my mother years later why the hell we didn’t turn around and go straight back home when we turned on the faucet and the cursed souls of egg demons poured from the tap, and she said we stayed to “enjoy each other’s company,” because apparently some people are satisfied by nothing more than conversation with other humans and are willing to overlook the minor inconveniences of tainted water and diaper pools. And yet the sulfur water was hardly the only terrible thing about that weekend. It was all terrible. There were bugs. It was itchy. We spent the whole weekend sitting by a campfire, where I learned that my body is extremely allergic to mosquitoes, which is a thing you can actually be allergic to, because every one of their tiny clawing bites turned into a giant welt. My only toy that weekend was a fly swatter, which I used to great effect, but still. I was being literally eaten alive in a tiny house car with nothing but egg water to soothe my wounds. On top of all that, I had the distinct privilege, as the youngest camper that weekend, of sleeping on the breakfast table. In true RV fashion, the surface of the kitchen table was detachable and, with a few maneuvers, turned into a bed. Imagine a restaurant booth, but take away the supporting leg and put the tabletop flush between the seats, and voilà, you got yourself an RV bed. At least that’s how they sold it to me when they told me I was sleeping on a breakfast table. Once you get over the initial excitement of getting to sleep where you eat your Froot Loops, you realize you’re sleeping on a literal table, which is perhaps the least appealing of sleeping surfaces. I was a kid, dehydrated from a scarcity of egg-free drinking water and sapped of all my blood from thirsty mosquitoes, so I’m sure I passed out.
When we finally escaped on Sunday evening, the rest of my family apparently content enough with a weekend of one another’s company, I spent the entire car ride home scratching my mosquito bites into bloody gashes and cursing the outdoors forever. Nature, I knew then more than ever, was nothing more than an itchy, putrid adventure into hell itself.
• • •
The older I got, and the more time I spent ignoring the outdoors, the more my distaste for nature evolved into genuine fear. Do I wish I could’ve grown into one of those burly men from the Discovery Channel who can make his own venison jerky and chase hurricanes and put out forest fires? Sure. But only because they get to spend a lot of very intimate time with other burly men in scant clothing, and I’m about that life. But alas, I grew into a true nature sissy, terrified not only by being outside but by what nature could do to me while I was indoors.
The very earliest dream I can remember was a nightmare I had when I couldn’t have been more than a few years old. I was playing outside when, in seconds, the sky turned violently gray and then pitch-black and I woke up in a pile of snot and tears and probably urine if we’re being honest, and it took a few packages of frozen waffles to console me.
There were no tall buildings in the suburbs where I grew up, so anytime there was bad weather, you could see the angry dark sky for miles and miles and it always made me feel so small and defenseless. We lived on the periphery of the tornado belt, after all. Every year at school, we’d have tornado drills, where we’d crawl into the hallways and roll into balls against the wall, and sometimes, if you didn’t get into the hallway quick enough, you’d have to start forming a row behind the kids who were already against the wall, so your tiny face was up in some other kid’s butt—but that was the price we paid for staying safe. I’d seen The Wizard of Oz enough times to know that tornadoes weren’t fucking around. I mean, sure, a tornado flung Dorothy to a land of tiny dancing homosexuals, which I wouldn’t have been opposed to, but also, her house literally killed someone! I wasn’t about to be the next person with fabulous shoes to get killed in a tornado.
And yes, that’s an entirely normal fear to have. Long before I was born, my mother’s cousin was killed in a tornado in the next town over, and perhaps it was my mother’s constant repetition of that story, or perhaps it was something deeper, but every summer, my fear of storms got worse and worse.
One summer, my mother was mowing the lawn with an electric mower that was plugged into an outlet with a long, winding extension cord. It started pouring rain and she didn’t stop mowing, and I went outside and stood next to her literally screaming my eyes out over the claps of thunder because I was sure she was about to be electrocuted to death. (Which is a concern I would maintain today. Not the brightest idea on her part.) I was sobbing convulsively, convinced that if she weren’t electrocuted, she’d definitely be struck by lightning or swept up by a tornado that was obviously headed directly to our house. She finished the job, which I’m sure I made ten times more difficult by standing in her path, and somehow she was never electrocuted to death. But it remains possibly the most scared I’ve ever been.
There was one storm in particular, probably around 1998, that struck while we were at a public pool. And yes, before you judge us, we went to public pools. We didn’t get a fancy aboveground pool in our backyard until the 2000s, so we were forced to go swimming in public like animals. It was a balmy, cloudy day, but otherwise storm-less, and the entire family went. About halfway through the day, a lifeguard spotted lightning and made everybody get out of the water until the storm clouds passed over, which was perfectly fine, because it was lunchtime, and I was hungry.
While we sat unpeeling our peanut butter sandwiches from their damp plastic wraps, I looked up and saw a sinister cloud billowing toward us, a plume of green-gray smoke. I’d seen plenty of storm clouds before, but no cloud moved as menacingly as this one, like a thick snake uncoiling rapidly above us. Suddenly, the winds whipped violently around us, the rain came down like bullets, and everybody was running in a different direction. “This is the big one!” my mother screamed. A sign from the hot dog stand came loose and flew down and
hit the person next to me in the head. I stood up, threw away my entire sandwich, and ran for the closest structure: the women’s bathroom. We all darted inside and clung to the concrete walls, which shook against the wind. I turned to find my older cousin sobbing uncontrollably with a hot dog in his hand. His body was convulsing, but he kept eating. It remains the most hilarious, yet terrifying moment of my childhood.
Eventually, the storm passed and we all survived. But a giant tree was literally ripped from its roots and thrown into the shallow end of the pool where we’d been swimming a half hour earlier.
So to anyone who says that my fear of nature is unfounded, that I’m a grown-ass man who lives in a city where the most dangerous wildlife are dog-sized cockroaches and rat kings, that your chances of getting bit by a radioactive spider or swept away in a tornado, especially in New York City, are far less than the chances of slipping in the shower as a result of dancing too hard to a Spice Girls song and trying to finish my sub sandwich, know that my terror is well-rooted in a history of what I consider dramatic near-deaths, and I’m lucky to be alive. You can take your outdoors propaganda to the next fool unfazed by the presence of vicious cyclones and bloodthirsty bears, and when he gets ripped apart and thrown to another state, I’ll be inside, under three layers of sheets and blankets, whispering over and over, “I told you so.”
ON TEENAGERS AND WHY THEY’RE THE WORST
There is no species on earth that strikes as much fear in my heart as the American teenager. And yes, I’m singling out Americans, because I’m pretty sure teenagers don’t even exist in other countries. In France, they go right from being babies to being cigarette-smoking, coffee-swilling adult men with lush chest hair, and that’s not even an offensive description, because everybody in France would agree with me. I have a friend who’s French and she says so. But we’re talking about America here, where babies grow up to be even bigger babies, and all we really get along the way is incurable anxiety and crippling student loan debt. We’re the only country in the world where children are coddled for a full twenty-five to forty years, and teenagers, falling right in the middle of that incubation period, are given free rein to wreak terror on society.
I, for one, am not a fan of teenagers, if you couldn’t tell, and not just because they know more about sex than I do. Teenagers are objectively terrifying. They gather in parking lots and behind gas stations and under bridges, plotting ways to destroy the world, and I don’t trust them even a little bit. You would think that their lanky, underdeveloped bodies would be vulnerable, like a snake after it molts its skin. But somehow the mixture of teenage angst and hormones festers to create an unpredictable beast unseen anywhere else in nature. It astounds me that we actively encourage teenagers to become babysitters. Babysitters. As in, the people we trust to sit on our nation’s babies. “Oh sure, you can barely control your own disgusting body, but go ahead and take care of my completely defenseless infant. Also, here’s some car keys, because you may only be sixteen and your brain isn’t fully developed yet, but I trust you implicitly to operate my four-thousand-pound vehicle.” Honestly, I miss the old days, when everybody died peacefully of cholera at the ripe old age of thirteen, surrounded by their grandchildren.
But let’s focus. Teenagers are disgusting. Their bodies produce fragrances and flavors that could unclog even the most congested of sinuses. Their skin is sticky, they smell, and they have absolutely no regard for basic garbage disposal. I’ll be honest, I don’t know how my mother managed to live with my father and two teenage boys for a full decade without burning down the house the second she found a questionable tissue stuck to the carpet. Ecologists could write volumes about the communities of organisms that lived in my teenage bedsheets alone. I went into my brother’s bedroom once and saw a pillowcase physically carry itself across the room to feed on the bottom of a nearly empty bowl of cereal. That’s real. That really happened. Some say he still sleeps on the same unwashed sheets today. (Me. I say that.)
Worst of all, the modern American teenager is merciless in attitude. Perhaps it’s because they don’t yet realize life will one day utterly destroy them, or perhaps it’s because they do, but teenagers have the unique ability to emotionally ravage you without lifting a single finger. And I’m not talking about the gangs of them that wait outside Dunkin’ Donuts every morning to taunt me for buying three boxes of assorted Munchkins in sweatpants. I’m talking about teenagers on the Internet.
I happen to make my living writing on the Internet. It’s a meager profession, and I have to sell my body on the side to make ends meet, but generally speaking, it comes with very little risk. The only workplace hazards I face regularly are: masturbating too many times in a row until it starts to kinda hurt, taking too long of a shower and turning into a lifeless prune, and choking to death on an egg roll because I don’t have a strapping, muscled boyfriend to perform the Heimlich on me. But I would take any of those things over the real danger I face every day: the cutting insult from a mean-as-hell teenage girl.
Because I’ve chosen to write about my interests, which happen to include attractive young men, pop music, boy-band stars, and television programs featuring all of the above, I’ve somehow attracted a regular audience of intensely feral teenage girls, who collectively make up a stronger offensive force than all of the world’s militaries combined. Seriously, if teenage girls decide to organize one day, there’s literally nothing we can do to stop them. Just go on the Internet and look up pictures from any Justin Bieber concert. There are girls bursting through steel barricades, dismembering security guards, and feasting on one another’s flesh. And this is all before we’ve even allowed them to vote.
When they like you, of course, there’s no problem. In fact, I’ve had plenty of perfectly rewarding interactions with teenage girls on the Internet, which is a sentence that would normally land a grown man like myself on Dateline, but it’s OK, because we’re preying on Zac Efron and not one another. But say one wrong thing, however innocuous yet hilarious you think it may be, and you become Teenage Girl Enemy Number One. And let me tell you, teenage angst knows no borders. I’ve been yelled at in more languages and from more countries than I knew existed. All for daring to say that a boy-band member (who shall remain nameless because I value my life) should perhaps cut his hair an inch shorter, and possibly consider using shampoo.
And teenage girls don’t hold back. I’m chubby, gay, pale, and a whole decade older than most of them, which means I might as well wear a sign that says, “Hello, fellow Internet users, please destroy my entire life.” I’ve been called an un-toasted marshmallow; an old loaf of Wonder Bread; a slice of unbuttered toast (a lot of their insults are carb-based); a balding, middle-aged menace; someone who should go ahead and kill himself already; and my personal favorite, “Casper the faggot ghost,” which would be offensive if it weren’t so clever and nostalgic. (Kudos to today’s youth for honoring a classic nineties movie. Also Human Casper was adorable, so fuck you, teens.)
Of course, I’ve angered a great many people on the Internet for a number of reasons. It’s kind of impossible to exist on the Internet without angering at least 10 percent of the people who interact with you. But insults from teenage girls always seem to cut deepest.
I have a number of theories as to why this is true. Some would say society pressures girls into living up to impossible standards and turns them against one another at the earliest possible age, meaning they’re literally prepared for war at all times and are likely to lash out at whatever target happens to provoke them at any given moment, which is usually me, a pasty gay who’s writing about their favorite Jonas brother. It also doesn’t help that I show up to their concerts and stand in front of them and scream louder than they do, but I can’t help that my hormones are just as aggressive as theirs. But the theory that seems most true is the simplest: teenagers are assholes.
So let’s talk about teenage assholes. Not like, literal teenage assholes. If the FBI is reading this, please don’t arrest me f
or typing “teenage assholes.” It’s not what you think. I’m talking about teenage assholes, like teenagers who are assholes. Not teenagers who have assholes. Although probably every teenager has an asshole, so I guess we’re talking about teenagers who do technically have assholes, but we’re not talking about their literal assholes, we’re talking about how they are assholes. I’m glad we cleared that up. Anyway, let’s talk about teenage assholes.
I was a teenage asshole. And not just any teenage asshole, but the worst kind of teenage asshole: the self-righteous, nerdy teenage asshole. Yes, nerds can be assholes, too, and sometimes, they’re even worse assholes than the other types of assholes, because they grow up thinking that the world owes them something for making them a nerd. I would’ve saved myself a lot of trouble if I could have gone back and told this to my child self. I would’ve taken that scruffy ginger nerd by the collar and shook him till his glasses fell off. It’s what he deserved. But alas, I became the asshole I would so despise.
In third grade, I fashioned myself a budding sociologist, and laid out what I believed to be an irrefutable system by which I could categorize the entire third-grade class. There were, according to my scientific observations, three distinct social echelons into which every one of my classmates could be placed. There were the popular kids, of course—the girls with pretty hair, and the boys who could run farther than a hundred feet without bending over in agonizing pain. There were the obviously unpopular kids—the girl who sat inside during recess to read books and the boy who brought his pet mouse to the playground in his jacket pocket. (Listen, I know these are cruel and arbitrary factors, but really, what the fuck kind of child brings a mouse to school?) And then there was the third, in-between group of kids who clearly weren’t popular, but weren’t exactly unpopular, who simply existed beneath the radar, somewhere in the middle of it all. I’ll let you guess which group I placed myself in.
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