Gabe Durham - Fun Camp

When you’re improvising and you hit a bad note, hit it again a few times. Own the note, shine your brights on it, let everyone know you are up to something . The Law of Facial Control holds that 90 % of the audience is evaluating your performance with the wrong organs anyway. Dilute and mask, not for your comfort but for theirs. Everybody wants to be lied to sometimes, which is to say, cared for. Other times, well. My lover: If I smile naturally, suspect I’m up to something. My friends: If I ever kiss all of you, you’ll know I’ve just made a terrible mistake.

Keep them clean, kids. Act well, using method techniques like drawing from memories of some of the more intense emotional experiences you had in the last hour. Try to be complex and cathartic and redemptive. Gross-outs welcome. Have a spiritual message, though don’t go out and say it. There’s a nest of baby birds out the window behind the stage. This arresting scene is your competition. Are your acts more entertaining than their chirps? Appraise, then sign up, or don’t. No dressing in drag because of what’s-this-I-hear calls from parents. Closed-toed shoes preclude splinters. Do that drinking the toothpaste skit. Better still, do that Japanese submarine skit with the dumb guy who, after every command, goes, “How you do that?” When they twice fire torpedoes and both times miss their target and feel shame for having dishonored their ancestors and the whole gang commits honorable hari-kari, the guy turns to the audience, bloody sword in hand, and delivers his signature line, “How you do that?” The crowd, invited to consider that the idiot’s suffocation is just as inescapable as his comrades’ suicides, just loses it. Your rivals will peep with shame.

One camper’s here just to climb trees. One’s here to burn trees. One’s here to burn off some weight. One’s here to hone her stand-up routine. One’s an incognito child star researching for a role. One takes candid telephotos of the child star. One’s a little cop chasing a lead in a missing persons case. One’s a Russian spy boning up on vernacular. One’s an Iranian propagandist spreading misinformation about homosexuals. Two are promoters for a college downstate. One’s an angel-faced twenty-two-year-old writing up a Fast Times at Fun Camp expose. One beat him to it — thinks we don’t know about his tell-all scandal feed, @TheCandidCamper. One pot dealer. Four pot enthusiasts. Sixty are dying for someone to kiss this week. One’s two babies in a toddler trench coat. One’s a lonely dwarf. One’s at the wrong camp and thinks her peers are terminally ill like her. One’s a furtive little robot getting to the bottom of what love is. Me? I had my app for a weeklong can’t-talk meditation retreat three-quarters filled out before I saw you had to be eighteen to enroll, so I found a runner-up where at least the leaves still rustle. You? Judging by the wad of toilet paper that fell out of your bra in today’s sack race, I’d say you’re one of the sixty.

Whenever possible, I make it a point to witness the hypnopompic miracle that is a child waking in an unfamiliar bed. The breathing halts. The hands shoot out of the sleeping bag as if narrowly escaping some brutal troll’s maw then grope at the hard plastic mattress and the wooden frame of the bunk. The eyes stay shut to delay confirmation of this other place. The hands inch back into the bag — here the child attempts to transport herself home by denying her senses of unfamiliarity. But that’s not a satisfying solution, is it? So she slowly, reluctantly squints open an eye. What is this dark room? This elevated bunk? This woman smiling over me is not my mother! Relax, darling. You and Mom are in a trial separation. You begged her for this.

When you’re hungry, visit a starving nation and shame your body. Say: “Here I was thinking that a sandwich would be good, not realizing what atrophy could be.” When you’re grieving, stand near someone who has scraped her knee and shame your brain. Say: “I thought I missed the people I loved who died, but here is my skin, intact as all get out.” If the starver and the bleeder are as noble as they claim to be, they will overhear your confession and say something sager than anything I can think of, as I haven’t quite been a hundred percent lately, or ever.

*

Dear Mom,

I’ve learned four times as many knots in half a week at camp as you taught me in a decade!

Love,

Billy

The returners can tell you that camp is catnip to those bastards. It’s just too perfect an opportunity for him to pop back into your life, take you for a drunk backcountry cruise, and defend his absence away from the castrating gaze of you-know-who. When yours shows, you’ll offer a firm handshake and say, “Father, it is good to see you. I appreciate that you’ve driven some miles to visit me, your kin, to whom you wish to demonstrate your love. I cannot, however, accompany you to your truck for a harmless joyride, as each minute of my day here is accounted for and I am, under no circumstances, permitted to leave camp boundaries at any time. Out of concern for your immediate safety, I plead you’ll depart expediently. Chef Grogg has no doubt been alerted to your presence, and he is one dumb deadly animal.” It’s a mouthful, so I had the speech printed up on little cards to keep on your person at all times. Show of hands, who needs one? Come on, hands up. Nothing to be shy about. You’ve all got a leg up on the pussies from unbroken homes. While they mosey into adulthood, expectant in their dumb grins, you’ll have already learned just how hard you can bite without drawing blood.

How to explain this? If I felt how I feel now and this was a certain kind of story, I’d burst lasers out my fingertips and a calm man would take me to a secret school and show me how to burst my lasers to fight crime. But every calm man I’ve met in this place has held a paper plateful of Ready Whip behind his back, trying to catch me with my guard down, and I’ve never been told I have a special gift unless the speaker is addressing the whole group and singling me out as an example of someone who you might not think has a special gift. But something has begun to change this year, Sandra: I think I have a real shot at being the kind of girl who’s got it going on. I’ve begun to affect a walk that makes boy counselors’ eyes avert with effort. I’m perfecting a laugh to raise heart rates. I know the subtext behind twelve varieties of hug. I’m recognizing all time spent before a bathroom mirror as investment. I study you for new moves like I’ve never watched anyone older than eighteen, and I’ve begun to wonder if cool does not end at high school graduation as I’d once thought but in fact extends all the way into one’s early twenties. If I have what it takes, I owe it to myself to cultivate that potential. Teach me your secrets, Sandra, and I promise: whenever asked who gifted me my It Factor, I will forever cite you.

Negative portrayals of librarians smother the media. The fat shushing strumpet. The coke-bottle ogre. The lazy-eye Linda. One obvious solution is puppets. Persons who look disinterested when you do dishes or stand in line at the ATM move in closer when puppets take over. A puppet on each arm and you got yourself a love triangle. A puppet on each leg, you got a dance party. If you happen to be bad at it, it’s fine. I will have lived and loved fifty years this June and I’ve found precious few things I can say this about: The appeal of a good puppet compensates for the shortcomings of his operator. You could attach human hair for realism. You could try using puppets to solicit funds for more puppets. You could disappear in all the ways you always planned.