Gabe Durham - Fun Camp

Feel this knot. Yes, touch it. Post-veto, I was told my back would’ve been practed and kneeded had I narrated that my paindaggers had come on sudden in the a.m. Gander at a man’s leased camp shack, then ask me how long I’ll keep up the ole wince-and-grit for. Death, to thems, is the pickle you ask for none of, please. You might still get served a briny cuke in and on and beside your tray — it may yes happen — but some pimply shluck is gonna get the shitcan for it. That there is some blood-weary optimism in my spectation. Surprised for me, colt? This is worth leaping a parisian fence for, kiddo, unless your constituency cuts his own checks. A prior history is a costly flopping redundancy. My nightly prayers, in order of downward likeness: one is for said-mentioned outfromers to pod me in for a medicinal autotuning, two is for a blonde-bosomed young Montrealite staffer to arrive one summer, burned and beautiful, who’ll hitch me to her wagon and socialize me. Scram in case of either.

Damned if those kids don’t take some of the cock out of my walk, though. Delightful isolated moments, you bet, but after morning counselor meetings I get that pit-level dread, mouthing soundless expletives. Dread where the heart beats faster and the body deflates. Dread where they can smell that you don’t want to say hey or lead line-up cheers louder than the other cabins. They pick up on more than you think, yet they never pick up on that particular thing you’re so sure they know. Once-over a she-counselor and you feel a guilt the Catholics keep trying to claim for themselves, a guilt that goes, “If my kids only knew this heart, hoo-boy.” And if they did? They’re all spies ready to sell you out for an attaboy, new zeal smoothing their faces to bland mush. By the end of the week, I can’t tell my own boys apart. I cover it, addressing each of them with a “Cabin 3, what ,” which they’ve come to respond to more than their own names anyway.

I want us all to do an experiment together. Ready? [Pause ten seconds.] In the last ten seconds, each of you has forgotten just a tiny fraction of the math skills you picked up in school last year. Isn’t that wonderful? They can learn you up with whatever they want mid-August through early June, but in the interim, if you choose not to use it? [Clap hands free of unwanted math.] Gone for months. And that’s adulthood, kids: an endless string of summers full of sweet choice. It’s as fun as it sounds, and it’s never terrifying, not if you’re smart about it.

Myself having a religious background can understand your point. Sometimes I too wonder if identical twins have souls or only half-souls. Until cloning has been fully researched, no one knows if clones will live productive lives as human beings. As humans, however, we have placed ourselves on top of a ladder, God’s power in our hands, and with time and research, any bumps and risks can be smoothed just like anything in the middle of being discovered. After school some days, I picture me in a clone sisterhood where we gang up on the prime-numbered sisters, good-naturedly, though I am not a prime number in the scenario. Seeing versions of ourselves everywhere is cautionary, and we exercise like madwomen then strip down to our underwear in full-length mirrors to compare. We all kiss different clones of the same boy and mix ourselves up, sometimes on purpose, in case it tastes somehow different. We get old and pass kidneys around and get mad at Dad together. All our birthdays fall on the same day and that day is my birthday.

This is going to give me away but, whatever. Can you, Holly, an adult, presumably knowledgeable in the world’s rubbytouchy ways, tell me in good conscience that it’s my mind caught in the gutter when I lose my composure while singing, “Cool and creamy / We like cool and creamy / Cool and creamy / We like it a lot. // Do you like it in your face? / Yes I like it in my face. / In your face? / In my face! / In our face!” One go-through I could handle, but three? When in the second verse, we sing, “Do you like it in your ears?” And in the third, “hair?” Can you honesty tell me the song was not written with the intent of making naïve children sing about ejaculate? That an earlier draft was not instead called “Hot and Creamy” but that the author’s buddy got the bong out of his mouth long enough to suggest the author cover his tracks just a little? The truth is: You pulled me from morning cheers because I get the joke . The truth is: You barely got through your own scold with a straight face.

*

Dear Mom,

How often have you asked me what I would do without you? Five days apart, and we seem to have our answer: I would live, Mother. I live.

Billy Matthews

This game is Counselors-Only and begins on brooms. Fanciful, the way we like it, based on a movie my friend made when he saw a book a pretty girl was reading in the contemporary cinematic facelift of The Crucible . You drink and ride and drink and span the blacktop until you fall over. We rush around you and say what you’ll be, based on how you’re lying. Like one girl was spread-eagle so she became a patriotic ornithologist. One girl was dead so she became a ticket dispenser on I-90. One girl never fell so we cursed her children’s blood. It’s just fun, Holly. If you’ve got a better way of discovering God’s plan for my postgraduate life, scrawl it on a donut receipt, find some bored talons to stick it in, then tape up the bird and mail it wherever my soft body crumbled.

What’s so fun about Water Pong? Since when is hydration a penalty?

It’s come to the staff’s attention that a traitor among you has started her own canteen buck mint. This camper would need access to a Xerox machine, the yesteryear restraint to keep from spending her last canteen buck, pale green cardstock paper, the moral bankruptcy not to care, and the brains to pull it off, so already that rules out most of you, including all first-timers and all inner city scholarship kids. A part of me just wants to shut down camp early over this mint — I am serious as a broken pact here — a mint whose counterfeit product is realistic enough to fool even myself, having surveyed thousands of spent bucks in search of the mark of the fake. It’s the fact that I can use the word thousands that tipped us off, our week-end sales usually hitting the mid to high hundreds. That and the tummy troubles evident among a certain contingent of Cabin 2 girls. And the series of increasingly elaborate disguises said girls donned to purchase well past their camper daily health limit, a disguising that was permitted at the time for its ingenuity, for the “This is what camp is all about” feeling it gave on-duty staffers. And a Twix supply that ran out on day two, Twix being the fluke corporate item our townie vendor vends us, meaning our supplies are down to such complaint card name-checked perennials as Miss Marie’s Chewbarb Taffy and Mishima Confectionary’s Mangoflave Gingercakes, and so there will be no cause for fold-up chair-kicking outbursts when I pronounce the canteen closed until the culprits come forward and Stop. Ruining. Everything. Did I mention that each cabin is currently being searched, starting with Girls Cabin 2? Confess in the next thirty seconds and there’s a fresh hot cola in it for you, brewed personally by Ole Maud, a sweet blind townie whose story’ll just break your heart if you let her tell it.