Gabe Durham - Fun Camp

At a belief club meeting, a newcomer asks a question so elemental that the members laugh, delighted, having forgotten it could be asked. The newcomer squirms and the members are quick to apologize. They applaud her marksmanship, her rigor. Then they secure a time for the next week’s meeting. They’re not trying to dodge the question. They think they’ve answered it.

A word to the cultists — yes, you in your robes, the boys who cried apocalypse: We’re pulling the plug. It’s a little solipsistic to have witnessed a few distant mushroom-like smoke clouds and assume a wrecked world, parents all dead, and that God has chosen the innocents of Fun Camp for a new Eden. All you tittering fence-sitters: Think it’s an accident this new one true faith came from Boys Cabin 1? Continuation of the species is man’s oldest pickup line. I’m sure the gophers you blood-sacrificed would be real happy to learn their deaths are wrapped up in the wet dreams of some teenage would-be Christs. Speaking of, Jason, you’re paying for that tablecloth you’re wearing, and Tad, whose 501s did you massacre to make that Jesus sash? You look like runner-up in a West Virginia beauty pageant. Who’s booing? Hey — who was just booing? Any more of you want to make a midnight raid on the iPhone closet, you’ll find I’ve moved the phones to an undisclosed site and the batteries to the vault under the snack shack. Nature-knowing is about avoidance and you’re all too wrecked to get there alone. You’ve got fifty-one weeks out of the year to check your scores and count your dead. Surrender this one to fun.

Today we make bean people. We’ll each glue six to ten beans to a sheet of construction paper — light-colored is best, blue or gray or yellow, so the beans look like they’re three-dimensional, which they are. Then we’re going to paint faces on the beans, different expressions but especially smiling, and draw legs and arms on the paper around the beans. Hands and feet too if you like. Shirts and ties and jobs and bills, fill out the lives of your bean people with the richness of your imaginations. You can make them into fish, cats, dogs, birds, bugs, whatever. You can make them skate, ski, crawl, fly, any G-rated thing at all, just by drawing what their limbs are doing. But before we begin, let’s pass the big sack of beans around, careful not to spill, and each take a turn reaching a hand in deep. Aren’t the beans cool and smooth? They almost feel wet, don’t they? This is one of those shortcuts to pleasure, kids, sticking your hand deep in some beans. We don’t ask why it’s so good, we just be thankful.

Getting stuck nodding while Chef Grogg holds forth makes my mouth feel all, what, like full of rocks and slobbering. Could he not talk to us as a rule?

I’ve got no peroxide for that hurt. If he doesn’t love you back, girlfriend: a story.

Roy, a baby, was named for a real man, cowboy Rogers. But all Roy did was bathe horses in a swimming pool. He stared out on the delta and beyond, to his sad soul.

A director one day passed him. “You have become a man now!” the director whispered in surprise.

“But I have no money,” Roy said.

That day, in an agent’s office: “I have your man.”

“Nobody wants a cowboy star,” the agent mentioned.

Roy got on the horse. “Something in mind?” He had the look all right.

At his film, a non-white man gave him his first crack of cocaine and Roy was never the same. In his mind, he bathed horses of the rainbow. His Mom forgave him for forgetting her address, watching his reruns and happily singing his song out and proud. Roy’s dad said sorry for leaving.

Roy got dry. Roy went to schools and told his Tale of Caution. Always, when he told them, children laughed but obeyed his commands.

When the gaslight blinks to say my inspiration tank’s low, I look to the Middle Ages. A man back then who had a beef with his neighbor didn’t hire a suit, he simply challenged the neighbor to a battle to the death. Since God wouldn’t let an innocent man down, whoever remained standing was righteous. The other favored mode until Trial by Jury yawned its way into common practice in the 13 thcentury was the Ordeal, in which the accused would have to walk through fire, carry a hot iron, or run the gauntlet. And if you passed, you were innocent — opposite logic of the Puritan “If she burns, she’s a witch” model. Pretty sensible, if grisly. For me, nothing puts my life on a path like a good coin flip or a straw draw. Give the divine room to do its mysterious thing. I feel for the courts, making their judgments, but their errors are well-documented. When an innocent man finds himself strapped to a chair he’ll never stand up from, it’s the outcome of a fallen world without the courage to leave a thing like justice up to chance.

*

Dear Mom,

What have you done?

Billy

One night at skits back when I was a camper, one of the tight-jeaned older heartthrob guys from Cabin 1 got up and said, “Here’s a song I like,” and they’d rigged up the PA to play a seven-minute David Bazan song, the first I’d heard by him. I later acquired the guy’s whole catalogue, listened my way through Bazan’s ascent / descent from sleepy Christian sweetie pie to conflicted Christian questioner to pissed-off agnostic antagonizer. All his best music is from that middle period when he was in the thick of it. The track in question, “Secret of the Easy Yoke,” is a gorgeous downer about wanting to know God while ever put off by His parishioners. “I still have never seen you,” Bazan sings in the chorus, “and some days I don’t love you at all.” After the bridge, there’s an instrumental verse that functions as an outro. When the song finished playing that night at skits, the heartthrob got back up and told of the time he saw Bazan play the song live. Bazan allegedly played it just as he had on the album until the third (no longer instrumental) verse, in which he sang, “In a moment, I’m alive again.” So after the show, heartthrob asked Bazan why he didn’t sing the line on the album version. Bazan said, “Because that’s the verse where I reconcile with God. But you have to figure that part out for yourself.” And I thought, This guy talked to a musician after a concert? Badass. And then Brent bought all the albums and then I bought all the albums. And on YouTube there’s a more recent video of Bazan playing the song live and he just ends it at the bridge.

When a devout man swears with the explicit intent of remaining relevant to the culture at large, isn’t he just not-swearing in disguise?

Boy w/ Frosty Tips in Line at Dinner — w4m — 13: You, a lake pirate from the wrong side of the tracks. Me, an unconventionally pretty self-starter often beside a huskier “wingwoman” type. You asked if I knew whether we could start with two cornbreads. I didn’t know and said so. You said not to worry about it, practically feeling me up with eye contact. You had a sweatshirt tucked into a pair of black shorts so baggy they could fit two people — an invitation? Later I found out we have to start with one cornbread and wait for everybody to go through the line before going back for more. Write me back what color hoodie I was wearing. Or if you already know who this is, come find me at quiet time tomorrow. Bring chapstick.