Primal Fears
(Originally published August 29, 2010)
I’M LEAVING TOMORROW for two months in New Orleans, which should translate to great stories aplenty. But before that, some good old-fashioned nostalgia as summer draws to a close.
I have a theory that kids raised in cities always turn out a little fucked up. In a place like Los Angeles or New York, you develop a particular kind of hardness; rather than worry about your mom killing you if you flunk a test, you worry about a homeless man killing you on a bus. Instead of poison ivy, you try not to catch AIDS. These sorts of things.
I’m not a “city kid,” but I spent my first five years in Manhattan, and I like to think it led me to develop fears and anxieties more grown-up than monsters under the bed. The funny part – as always: not at the time, but looking back – was that circumstances in my life always seem to conspire to give me worse things to fear.
At age 12, I went with my parents to see the movie The Devil’s Own. It was Rated “R” but so was Air Force One, which my friend’s dad brought us to see just weeks before. (I liked so much I saw it twice more, once with my elderly grandfather.)
Regarding The Devil’s Own, the key detail is that I watched it with my parents, who I love very much. The film opens on a pleasant scene: an Irish family – father, mother, and son – enjoy a nice dinner. “That’s like my family,” I thought. Then a guy in a mask kicks open the door and shoots the father in the head.
Inexplicably, I suddenly developed a strong fear of my parents being murdered.
To ease my concerns, my mom told me, “Don’t worry, it’s just a movie. However, I just read in the news about a family in the next town. Two strangers broke into their house, tied everyone up, and forced the kids to watch as they made the parents drink Drano. Don’t drink Drano, by the way; it’s an awful way to die. Anyway, I don’t know if the two strangers even stole anything, or even wanted anything, except to see the terror in the children’s faces as their parents died in front of them. They never caught those two men. They’re still out there. Well… goodnight!”
For two years I slept with one eye open, ready to defend my family Home-Alone-style if need be. My parents should have known something was wrong when I started keeping a hockey stick and baseball bat by my bed, despite hating sports, but I never said a thing. Why upset them? Parents want their kids to be happy.
Camp Dudley, on the other hand, was openly contemptuous of the happiness of children. I referenced it briefly, but there’s more to it than bats. (Let me preface this by saying that this is strictly my experience, and that Camp Dudley has been “inspiring boys and men alike” for over 100 years.) My parents enrolled me at Dudley on the recommendation of family friends. It was about a five-hour drive. My clothes were packed in a large, pine-scented trunk – like a coffin – and aside from clothes, all I had were toiletries and a Walkman with a single mix tape. That was it. Camp Dudley is meant to be like “the good old days,” with no electricity and four showers for hundreds of kids. Your best bet for hygiene was to jump in the lake. My dad said it reminded him of the ‘50s:
“Those were very bad times.”
I was sentenced to four weeks. Parents were allowed to visit after two, but kids weren’t allowed to call home before that. All we could do was send letters or postcards. I’ll explain why shortly...
First order of business was passing the swim test at the lake. Much like their sensationalist warnings about rabid bats, camp counselors cautioned us not to climb the sides of the docks because there’d been an explosive growth of a particularly aggressive barnacle: “You could cut your feet… or worse!” I met a black kid there named Chris and we became friends. I couldn’t figure out why other kids picked on him – Camp Dudley was about good Christian values; who cares if he was different? – until I discovered he had a knack for screwing things up.
This revelation came on a several day camping trip at the end of the first week, with a pair of counselors, who, in hindsight, were way too high to be looking after kids.
We found a campsite way up the mountain and used nylon rope to secure our “bear bag” – the sack with all our food and supplies – up in a tree. The name concerned me, because it implied bears. Camp Dudley had a policy of using fun nicknames for unpleasant things, like “bear bag” or “beaver fever” (the cholera-like illness one develops from drinking unpurified river water).
Having mentioned our “bear bag,” what do you think happened our first night? That’s right, the Goddamn thing was torn down and ravaged by bears. All it left were pots and pans and packets of instant oatmeal. (If a bear won’t eat it, it’s probably not food.) Buckets of rain were pummeling our tent when we awoke to find our supplies gone. In order not to catch “beaver fever,” Camp Dudley supplied us with dissolving tablets to decontaminate the water, but our drug-addled counselors brought only half the necessary supply. Then, after detoxing our first whole jug of water, Chris accidentally knocked it over.
We spent a few more hours trying to build a fire in the rain, to boil the bacteria out instead.
Our camping trip ended two days early, right as the rain stopped. On the way down the mountain, we ran into a party of Australian campers who just arrived, set up a grill, and were cooking surf and turf. They asked if we wanted some “shrimp on the barbie” because they had more than enough. Our counselor said, “No thanks.” (I hated him.) Then we got down to the road where our bus was supposed to pick us up, and Chris knocked over another jug of drinking water, our last one, with the fruit-punch flavoring. (We all hated Chris.)
Back at Dudley, they held a bonfire sing-a-long for kids returning from the woods. Each group was assigned a church hymn and asked to rewrite the lyrics to tell the story of their camping experience. Our group’s song was “When Morning Guilds the Skies”:
“When Morning Gilt the Skies,
Our Bear Bag Didn’t Survive…”
I jumped in: “WE STARVED FOR THREE DAYS.” (Our counselor made us change it to “We Fasted for Three Days,” to imply that not eating was a choice.)
After the sing-a-long, the lead counselor gathered us close and got serious:
“Listen, guys, I don’t know if you know this, but Camp Dudley is located just a few miles away from a mental asylum, and we just got word that four of their most dangerous inmates have escaped. One of them strangled five women and left them by the side of the road. Another used a knife…” I’m not doing it justice; he went through a detailed description of four murderers he claimed were on the loose, then sent us back to our cabins, saying, “Make sure you lock your doors tonight and hopefully we’ll see you tomorrow.” It was the prototypical Camp Dudley ghost story, because there was no “gotcha” punchline. We were just told it was true, that we should go back to our cabins to maybe die. When I got in bed that night, I popped in my headphones, let my Walkman run through both sides of the cassette five times each, then “woke up” for breakfast. On the one hand, I didn’t sleep. On the other, I memorized “One Headlight” by The Wallflowers and “I’m Just a Girl” by No Doubt.
Because I couldn’t call my parents to describe Hell on Earth, I had to write them a letter. On my way to get paper and pens, I peeked in our cabin window and saw our counselor sitting at a table with a bunch of other campers' postcards and letters. He was reading our mail! I didn’t write my letter that day, and when I finally did, I tried to word it so as not to alert the guards:
“Although I am having a fine time here, nothing can match the warm comforts of home…”
I’d lost 20 pounds by Parents’ Weekend, despite eating dessert after both lunch and dinner. Sure we played sports and did other activities, but most of the weight came off by trembling in fear. None of my clothes fit anymore, but I took special care to pick out the most tattered, filthy set I could find for Parents' Weekend, so they'd see me looking like I’d gone not to summer camp but a hobo apprenticeship.
When they arrived I told them everything, everything I couldn’t through our censored mail. (“We went days at a time without food or water, but the psychological abuse was more than adequate.”) I’d alternate between being pitiful and playing stoic, letting my appearance do the work. (“I’ll be fine. Just two more weeks? I’ll probably make it.”) That’s how I finagled my way to an early exit. It’s one of the few times I’ve played the sympathy card, but I’m a city kid at hard – “a little fucked up,” in my own words – and the great outdoors were killing me.
Right before I left, my counselor took me to the basketball courts for a game of HORSE and a heart-to-heart:
“So you wanna leave?”
“Yep.”
“Was there anything I could’ve done different?”
“No, you were fine.”
“The other kids?”
“Nope. Everyone was fine.”
“Yep.”
“Yep…”
We had nothing to say to each other, but it was a nice gesture from a guy who looked like the lead singer of Everclear. He’d done his best, but there was no way I was sticking around. They’d made me afraid of every thing they could. Every thing but one: getting the hell out.