by Cathy Alter
The campgrounds turned out to be a fire hazard of brown brush, clouds of perpetually settling dust, and a row of four tilted Porta-Johns that I knew, upon entering, would turn me into a Johnny Knoxville skit where I’d tumble end over end until I came to a soggy landing, at which point the door would fly open and there I’d be, with my nylon pants around my knees, a camping spectacular for all to see.
We arrived just after lunch, fatally late in the world of campers in search of desirable plots, so we were relegated to a depressingly uneven patch of dirt. There was no avoiding being tightly packed against our neighbors, one of whom was the orgy tent. Ever since Karl and I learned that Amy, Larry, Tim, and Ellen were friends in the same way that Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice were friends, we had started pairing the word orgy with anything that had to do with them. For example, they flew on the orgy plane to get here, stopped at the orgy Starbucks for some latte, and were sleeping uncomfortably close to us in the orgy tent.
It suddenly occurred to me that the only thing Karl and these people had in common was a shared interest in motorcycles and that maybe he invited me along to help mitigate his own Index of Dread. Maybe we were in this mess together.
As Karl set about hammering stakes into the dry earth, I noticed a few bare-chested kids running around. For a moment I was greatly relieved, since I thought the sight of small children somehow indicated an early bedtime for the settlement. But then I noticed the trailer directly behind us. It had an eight-piece drum kit set up under its tarp.
“Rock and roll!” yelled Crazy Larry, who had just discovered our proximity to the band. With the intensity and square jaw of Henry Rollins, he received his nickname for being, well, a little crazy. I was worried about Larry, who on the outbound trip started calling me Yoko (when he wasn’t referring to me in third-person pronoun, as in “Tell her to sit in back,” or “She’ll go get our coffee”). It was the war cry of a jealous friend. Don’t come between us, Yoko. And I was worried about Karl, who, aided by a few campfire beers, might actually defend this guy.
I made a show of pulling out my green notebook, which immediately put Larry on guard. “Are you writing about this for a magazine?” he asked, eyeing the notebook. Larry was under the impression that I was preparing some Hunter S. Thompson exposé on men and their motorcycles. I was under the impression that if I waved around my notebook enough, Larry and everyone else would be on their best behavior for the duration of the trip. (Coincidentally, Monterey, California, featured prominently in Thompson’s book Hell’s Angels. It was in Monterey that a small group of Angels allegedly gang-raped two teenage girls, a crime that immediately catapulted the motorcycle club to outlaw status.)
While Larry, Tim, and Ellen took the orgy car to buy groceries and a portable grill, Karl, Amy, and I cut our way through the campgrounds and caught the shuttle bus up the winding road to the racetrack. The landscape looked like a Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote cartoon. As we approached the track, Karl began to visibly shake with excitement. He grabbed my wrist and brimmed, “I’m going to scream like a teenage girl!” Seeing Karl in such an unguarded, spazzed-out state, I forgot about my own campy melodramas. I saw that we were beginning to create a shared history, too: “Hey, remember that time on the bus when you screamed like a little girl?” For the first time since arriving at this wasteland, I felt certain I had made the right choice in coming.
There was a practice run in session, and Karl sprinted off the bus and made a beeline for the chain-link fence that wove around the track like a giant dragon’s tail.
“There’s Hayden!” Karl yelled, pushing his nose through one open link. “And Gibernau!”
“Rossi, Rossi!” shrieked Amy. An Italian mop-top with a baby face and absolutely no guile, Rossi was the easy favorite among women. Even I knew his name. But with the riders bulleting by us like a smudged line, I had no idea how she could isolate Rossi from the rest of the blurs. I was momentarily impressed and wondered if Amy, who hadn’t held down a steady job since I’d known her, could parlay this fantastic ocular talent into employment with the military—spotting enemy jets, for example.
After the session ended, we wandered around for a few more hours, drinking warm cups of beer and pushing our way through a tented midway filled with gumball-colored helmets, stiff leather jackets, and rows of glistening horsepower, before boarding the bus for home. I had successfully avoided using the facilities all day at the track, but when we arrived back at camp, it was time to face my fears. My strategy was to pick one Porta-John and stay loyal to it all weekend. I chose one on the end, closest to our tent, mostly because I remember reading somewhere that in public restrooms, the stalls on the end proved to be the cleanest.
My technique was to back in, because then I could focus on the door in front of me, rather than think of what was behind or beneath me. Other than the blinding chemical atmosphere of the interior, the visit wasn’t so traumatic.
With this small victory, I rejoined the group. Ellen had placed an assortment of hot dogs, hamburger patties, and veggie burgers on a briefcase-size grill. From my duffel bag, I pulled out four wooden Popsicle sticks onto which I had prewritten “Meat,” “Veggie,” “Rare,” and “Well Done,” a suggestion from Real Simple on how to serve up a summertime meal.
“Here,” I offered, “I made these markers to help you distinguish the meat from the veggie burgers.”
Ellen looked at me like I had just handed her a pile of used syringes. “The veggie ones have green in them,” she no-duhed me. “And I’m making them all medium.”
Everyone else sat Indian-style along the perimeter of a tarp, which was also doubling as a mat for Amy’s sleeping bag. As usual, Amy had brought nothing to the party and was mooching for anything she could get her hands on—extra socks, deodorant, dollar bills, Karl’s Camel Lights.
“A cigarette tastes so good when you’ve worked for it,” she noted.
The hours ahead of me seemed endless. I used the “Rare” Popsicle stick to clean under my fingernails. Pretty soon, Ellen and Amy were doing the same thing with the “Veggie” and “Well Done” sticks. The noise from the surrounding tents sounded like an entire suburb had left their doors and windows open and all decided to play their televisions at full volume. Mercifully, either due to technical difficulties or an act of God, the band behind us hadn’t yet materialized.
There was nothing left to do but drink. A lot, even for me, and I was drinking one beer to their three. When Tim broke out a deck of cards, things went downhill fast. We played Asshole, a fairly simple game perfectly suited to the escalating inebriation—which explained why I easily won the first hand and became, as per the rules, “the President.” With the position came power, at least for the next hand, and I got to enact a law that the other players had to follow.
“Larry, you may no longer use pronouns when referring to me.”
The light thrown by a small lantern caught Larry’s thin snarl. “Fuck off.” He pointed his finger at me but looked at Karl. “Tell her to shut up.”
I thought back to my Index of Dread. Now that I was in the middle of it all, suffering the pubescent rage of Larry and being basically ignored by self-satisfied dummies like Amy and Ellen, I found that my initial fear had been replaced by a wonderful indifference. I felt as if I had conquered the high school cafeteria.
Before Larry could bait Karl further (he was obviously disrespecting me as a way to incite Karl), I touched Karl’s arm and said, “Can we go to sleep now?”
“Let’s all go to bed,” he hissed, looking at Larry.
With only two of us in a four-man tent, and a roof that unzipped into a skylight, being inside a tent was not as claustrophobic as I expected. Karl had brought along a full-size air mattress, and once we zipped our two sleeping bags together, I was surprised by how much I liked the accommodations.
“Is this five-star enough for you?” Karl whispered.
I rolled toward him so our noses were touching. “It’s really not so bad,” I admitted.
“How are you holding up?” he asked.
“Okay,” I responded. My fidgety feet made shhft-shhft sounds in our sleeping bag.
“Are you sure?”
We were both avoiding the elephant in the other tent.
I shhft-shhfted some more until Karl finally scissored his warm legs around mine and said, “Is Larry getting to you?”
I surprised myself by getting a little teary. Maybe I hadn’t faced down my lunchroom tormentors after all. Or maybe I was just being manipulative. “I’m tired of being nice to someone who’s not nice to me,” I finally said.
Karl cupped the back of my head. “Then stop being nice.”
He slid his hands inside the waistband of my Patagonia base layer. Just as I realized I was about to have sex in a tent for the first time in my life, the orgy tent came to life. It didn’t take long before it felt like Karl and I were in there with them. Together in one giant sleeping bag.
“Let’s do shots of vodka!” Ellen cried. Amy let out some impressive ear-piercing shrieks.
“Knock it off!” growled Karl, switching on a small lantern.
“We’re on vacation. Vaaaaacaaaaashun!” Ellen taunted, drawing the word out into eight syllables.
Karl reached out and jabbed the tent wall, which was pretty much flush up against the orgy tent wall. “I’m not kidding.” He jab-jabbed. “I’m so tired my ass is twitching.”
“Aw, is the baby tired?” singsonged Larry. Then came his fist, shrouded in our tent wall.
“Drop it, man,” said Karl, “Now.” He grabbed Larry’s puppet fist and give it a twist.
“Drop what?” mocked Larry, pausing for effect before adding, “Man?”
“Fuck you,” said Karl.
“Fuck YOU,” said Larry.
“No, fuck you.”
“No, fuck you.”
“You.”
“No, you,” said Larry, changing the rhythm slightly by adding a “pussy” at the end.
Karl handed me a pair of earplugs and asked me to put them in.
“You have five seconds to shut the fuck up,” he yelled over to Larry.
I had been so worried about Karl seeing me in a bad light, I hadn’t figured on Karl being the one to degenerate first. “I’ll be right back,” I said, unzipping the tent door.
With my earplugs still in, I experienced an eerie calm inside the Porta-John—until I detected a muffled scream of, “No, Karl, no!”
Yanking out one earplug, I heard Karl yelling, Larry yelling, and a group of unfamiliar voices yelling. In the time it had taken me to make my silent bathroom walk, Karl had obviously punched Larry, a dustup had ensued, and some of our neighbors had busted up the brawl.
When I climbed back in the tent, my flashlight caught Karl laying spread-eagled on top of his sleeping bag, his eyes fixed on the apex of our tent’s ceiling. He was breathing hard, I could see that, but with one earplug still in, my senses were warped and I confused the sound of breathing with one of sobbing. So I leaned over and, with the back of my hand, felt his cheek for tears.
Crazy Larry was still mouthing off in his tent. “It’s over, Karl,” he mooned. “Find your own way back to the airport. No one likes you anymore—except her.”
“What did you do?” I whispered frantically.
“Nothing.”
“What did you do?”
“Nothing.”
My hand went from his cheek to his chest. His heart was beating like a rabbit.
“I don’t believe you.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, rolling away from my hand.
But I knew what he did. He defended my honor by putting his friend in a headlock. And I knew what I did. I had turned into an episode of The Real World, playing the victim, squirting some tears, and manipulating Karl with my crazy girl emotions. In less than a day, I had taken Karl from rapturous teenage girl to Irish street fighter. What if he thought I was too much of a mess? What if I had just ruined the whole trip? My Index of Dread list suddenly looked like a joke. Toughening up went way beyond peeing in a Porta-John.
I reached inside the tent’s convenient little inside pocket and felt around for my bottle of Ambien. Even though Dr. Oskar had warned me not to take a sleeping pill if I had been drinking, I swallowed one anyway.
I awoke to a smooth jazz version of “Go Ask Alice,” and the unmistakable sounds of motorcycles being started. It was 7:00 AM, and I still had two more days to go.
Outside, the sky was scrubbed an unblemished blue. I stood in the cool sun and brushed my teeth, rinsing with an unopened bottle of Poland Spring, which I found underneath one of our foldout chairs. Inside my duffel was a Ziploc bag filled with Glamour’s “What to Pack” skin items, cleanser, moisturizer, body/foot lotion, emergency pimple lotion, and deodorant. I hadn’t washed my face in twenty-four hours because the nearest sink, which looked like a pig’s trough, was located about half a mile away, at the top of a small brown hill. The showers, located in a small trailer, were even farther away. Luckily, Amy had left a Mylar bag of Pond’s facial pads ( her only contribution to the trip) by the door to the orgy tent.
While Karl slept, I sat in a foldout chair and consulted Marie Claire’s “10 Best Ways to Look Hot Despite the Heat.” I was specifically concerned with number 4, “Nix a sweaty neckline with two ponytails (one slightly higher than the other), a great trick for layered hair.” The model demonstrating this technique was adorable, her twin tails looked fun and carefree.
“How about a hat?” Karl suggested, confirming what I had already suspected—I looked like an ass. With two tails. He crawled out of our tent and handed me a yellow painter’s cap with Valentino Rossi’s number 46 across the brim, free swag from the Yamaha tent.
We spent the day perched on top of a massive peak, watching the riders come shooting down a small portion of the track, like kids on a waterslide. We passed a pair of binoculars back and forth, and Karl tried to make the monotony of bike, bike, bike, nothing, nothing, nothing, bike, bike, nothing more appealing by imparting the racing history of every single MotoGP competitor since the dawn of time. It was a diversion tactic, of course, a way for him to avoid talking about last night’s pugilistic spectacular.
But I was desperate to know that everything was okay between us. So desperate, in fact, that I committed verbal plagiarism.
“Thanks for making me feel so safe,” I said, lifting verbatim from this month’s Cosmo, “Four Ways to Stroke His Ego.”
It was really amazing how much magazine-speak had seeped into my language center. I was immune to nothing, no matter how cliché!
“This trip has been a true test of your mettle,” he noted, taking my hand for the first time all day. “I’m really glad you decided to come.”
Maybe Cosmo was on to something.
That evening played out like the previous one, minus the brouhaha and plus the camper band playing a four-hour set of ZZ Top and Lynyrd Skynyrd. ( When the crowd started to boo the fifth reprisal of “Legs,” the singer apologized with, “Just remember, we’re free.”) The following day, too, was a repeat, except for a racetrack appearance by Brad Pitt and Adrien Brody, whom I viewed through my binoculars.
“This deserves a hug,” said Larry to Karl, who extended his olive branch after two Americans, their favorite racers, took first and second place.
After the final race, we broke down our camp and drove to Santa Cruz, where we spent our last night in the comfort of a hotel with turquoise-colored walls and pink and green starfish on the bedspreads. For the first time in three days, I sat down on the toilet. Suddenly, every entire thing felt like a reawakening, from taking a shower, which left an impressive ring of dirt around the tub, to seeing my reflection in the mirror. I hardly recognized myself. It looked like I had summered in Saint-Tropez. I couldn’t get over the whites of my eyes, which l
ooked like they’d been Photoshopped. Amazingly, the first word that popped into my head was healthy.
Sitting on the starfish bed with my hair clean and softly air drying, watching The Sopranos, I felt a deep contentment. My whole life, I’ve carried the reputation in my family for being delicate and hypersensitive. Their words, not mine—but words I had always pinned to my chest. Less than a week had transpired since I had composed my Index of Dread. I pulled out the chart and considered the Enjoyment Evaluation. (Remember, the lower the EE number, the lower the pleasure I had derived.)
I came, I saw, I camped. The only thing that remained a constant was my absolute dread/total lack of enjoyment of the Porta-John. Not a surprise. What was notable, however, was how much I enjoyed leaving my vanity packed in a duffel bag for a few days, how nice it was not to care if the part in my hair was straight—or if I even had a part. I didn’t need a mirror to know that I was still there. And when I finally did see my reflection, in a hotel room that I once would have considered tacky, I didn’t comb it for flaws.
Karl was sleeping on the other bed, his right arm bent at the elbow, his hand poised like Adam in a Sistine Chapel finger point. In the scheme of things, maybe a fear of camping was a relatively manageable one, but that didn’t diminish the pride I felt lying there next to Karl on that pink and green bed. I honestly couldn’t remember the last time I felt so good about such a simple accomplishment.
I slipped outside and phoned Jeanne. “I survived the Porta-John!” I announced by way of a greeting.
“Oh, Cathy!” I could feel her genuine pleasure as she exhaled deeply. “You and Karl made it!”
AUGUST
Jean Therapy
the more magazines that arrived in my mailbox, the more overwhelmed I became. Under the foolish impression that I somehow didn’t have enough content to draw from, I filled out subscription cards to Jane and Harper’s Bazaar. Their arrival this month was enough to put me right over the edge. I had so many dirndl skirts, lip glazes, and sizzling summer sex tips in my head, I felt like I was cramming for an exam. (InStyle actually had a feature entitled “Fashion 101.”)