(summer camp)

Notes on camp

Forget Lake Whatchamahoolie—today’s campers are on a faster track

For more than a hundred years, parents horrified at the prospect of having to care for their restless, sullen teens with no help at all from algebra teachers have been dumping their progeny in summer camps. In the old days, as ’80s period pieces like Meatballs, Little Darlings and Friday the 13th document, these camps were shabby, isolated Edens of adolescent anarchy. Adult supervision was almost nonexistent. The air buzzed with sex and mosquitoes. Bloodthirsty maniacs skulked in the shadows. In other words, it was a lot like MySpace, only with canoes.

Which, of course, means that summer camps were way too awesome to last in that form forever. According to the American Camp Association, there are more than 12,000 camps operating in the U.S. now—and yet how many tout their ability to develop character through food-based property destruction, or advertise themselves as places where 15-year-old girls place bets on who will lose their virginity first?

In the old days, summer camps had their share of scheduled activities, but even with all the horseback-riding, archery lessons and scavenger hunts, their main draw was the Thoreauvian idleness they imposed on their charges. Out in the deep woods, with no shopping malls, no TVs and no video arcades, there was nothing to do except smoke like French existentialists—Kristy McNichol developed a hearty appetite for cigarettes while filming Little Darlings—and ponder man’s true nature, the meaning of life, one’s place in the universe. Either that or play strip Monopoly until some lunatic gutted you with a rusty sickle.

Now, however, idleness and introspection have as little cachet at summer camp as they do everywhere else in contemporary society. Instead, productivity and highly specialized expertise are the goals of today’s camps. At the Digital Media Academy, for example, teen campers study “the most relevant software used in Hollywood and the entertainment industry, video-game design and web design while gaining hands-on experience under the eye of highly-accomplished professionals.” Others promise to launch 12-year-olds on the fast track to Harvard, Broadway and the NBA via intensive, nurturing tutelage from world-class ulcer-inducers.

As the tubby misfits get funneled to tubby-misfit camp, and the tween Bible-thumpers get funneled to tween-Bible-thumper camp, should we mourn the passing of the melting-pot ethos that made it so easy to cast summer camp movies? (“You must be the short depressed kid we ordered,” Bill Murray exclaims in Meatballs. “Glad you made it.”) A generation ago, a six-week sentence in a dumpy Catskills cabin prepared young teens for the real world by teaching them how to bully and ostracize kids of all kinds; today’s narrowly focused campers only learn how to bully and ostracize those just like themselves.

But don’t worry too much about the long-term impact of that cultural shift. The traditional summer camp experience—with all its contemplative down-time, all its heterogeneous drama—is still available to those who want it. We just reserve it for adults only now and call it by a different name: reality TV.

(summer creatures)

Pop!

You’ve just killed the first roach of summer

By Stacy J. Willis

They pop when you smush them. It’s a sound and a feeling, a sensation that travels simultaneously from your hand up your arm, and from your ear into your skull, arriving in the fight-or-flight center of the brain in force: cockroach exploding. Crispy exoskeleton crackling, legs squirming, eyeballs squishing, antennae breaking, guts ejecting from all sides like the innards of a large, gooey raisin—a filthy, germ-infested, rotten raisin ball. It may multiply into hundreds of other cockroach babies on contact. It’s screaming to its kin.

All around, under the furniture, in the walls, beneath the floor, in the pipes, on the roof, burrowed into the lawn, the sand, the rocks, multiple thousands of its brethren come alive, squiggle faster, forward, propelled by the attack, determined to avenge it. Soon they will be dropping from the ceiling, soon they will be running across your toes, up your pants leg, soon they will be in every box of cereal, in the kitchen drawers, in the bathroom medicine cabinet, soon they will crawl into your ears as you sleep, into your mouth, nest in your pillow.

This is what you consider when you first see it, black-brown beast of the most fetid sewer now crouching on your pristine white wall, somehow sticking there with ticky-tacky roach feet, a giant dark spot on your clean ethos, your central nervous system, your world. You’ve got to be rid of it. But how? It will pop. Eew. And with what? A shoe? Then there will be roach guts all over your shoe, dear God. And on the wall. And how would you clean that? And wouldn’t it require more proximity to roach corpse-matter than you are constitutionally capable of enduring?

Thank God for Kafka, the only manageable representation of a cockroach in all of history. Being one would be a relief. Having one on the wall inside your home is very nearly unbearable.

You get the shoe, something hard-soled, a sandal. You fluff up your fortitude and head toward the beast, and it runs. Motherf--king fast. Unnaturally, freakishly fast, with little legs squiggling in some way that disturbs something primal in you. It is further up the wall now, too high for you to reach, but still close enough to scare the shit out of you in its promise to run back down, or drop, or dive-bomb you. What now? You throw the shoe, of course. In a panic. Shit! It misses. And the bug scurries back down the wall, to the baseboard, and the threat is super-imminent now; it’s bound to head your way, to do what is unclear, but irrelevant—it’s moving in on your ground. You run.

You are 5 feet 8 inches tall, and you are running from something the size of your thumb that is not poisonous. This is not something you want anyone to witness. But the monster is unleashed now, that one on the baseboard, that one in your central nervous system. Someone will not make it through this. At this moment, it is unclear whom.

It slippery-slides toward you on the tile. You stomp, because holy shit what if it crawls onto you? You make noises like a wounded horse. Your arms flail just a bit. And your hard-soled foot lands right atop the whip-fast ball of putrid raisin slime, and ... POP! The sensation moves through your shoe, to your foot, up your leg, and simultaneously the sound moves from your ear into your brain’s amygdala, where fight and flight are pumped up again, again, again.

One of you is dead. And the other has just welcomed summer in Las Vegas.

(summer love)

I’m a guy

And you know what that means: No mushy love crap! No cancer, either.

By Steven Wells

Like you, I go through life with my thumb on the fast-forward button, whizzing past all the boring kissy bits. If you’re a guy, that is. If you’re not, then that last sentence was a lie. I’m really sensitive. But strong. Like a gay guy. But straight. Unless you’re a gay guy, in which case: Hi, I’m Steve. Wanna party?

This is an article about summer love, but trust me: It’s not going to be soppy. It’s not even going to be about love. It’s going to be about how awesome it is when attractive young people start walking around with very few clothes on. We all comfortable with that?

It’ll be dumb, I promise you. And as fluffy as a silk sack full of blond sex-kittens wearing pink Disney princess ears. No, dammit, fluffier—as fluffy as whatever it is that makes really cute sex-kittens go “Awwww.” And vaguely erotic. But in a nice way.

What it won’t be is about cancer. Or about how this time last year I had a freakish chemo-overdose that nearly killed me. I mean like dead. Jeez, who wants to read about that?

So there I am, two days before I nearly die, and I’m making desperate, frantic, sweaty love. To a specimen jar. Fearing the chemo might make me infertile, my wife and I are trying to bank some sperm. Hence the onanism, aided by “adult” magazines provided by the hospital. They’re not actually helping. There’s something about officially sanctioned pornography that’s deeply unerotic. And I say that as a lifelong socialist. Let’s nationalize the health services, the banks and the means of production. But let’s keep the commodification of sexuality in private hands. Agreed?

My attempts to ensure my genetic posterity are hampered not only by my enfeebled physical state but also by the chap in the bed next door who has the movie Patton turned up really loud, presumably to drown out my bestial grunting. And by the endless stream of doctors and nurses who have the uncanny knack of loudly ripping back the curtains every time I think I might be entering the vinegar strokes. Which I never do.

It was perhaps the most loveless experience of my life. But I have never, ever been more loved. There, it’s gotten soppy. I lied. Last summer, my wife of two years saved my life twice. This summer the streets might well once again be full of semi-naked beautiful young people. But seriously, who cares?

(summer reading)

Ain’t no sunshine

Save me from Sacramento, Bronte sisters!

By John Freeman

I became a reader during the summer of 1989, when I was 15. Every day, as the temperature climbed toward 100, I would clamber onto my parents’ roof outside of Sacramento with a towel and sunblock and a book. From the top of its pitch, the sleepy, suburban streets of our neighborhood took on a strange diorama quality. I could see into pools and over fences. Our backyard with its eucalyptus grove loomed at eye level. The heat made everything very quiet.

Gradually, as I adjusted to this higher, spy-glass view of the world, my eyes would drift down to the book I had brought with me, Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre or Madame Bovary. I was nothing if not an earnest reader, and that summer I took to 19th-century fiction. I felt trapped in Sacramento—the endless sunshine and good cheer, the church and schools. I felt deprived of the melancholy of bad weather. The Bronte sisters were just what I needed.

But rather than hide indoors and devour these books in the air conditioning, I climbed up into the heat out of stubbornness. I wasn’t going to be defeated by this environment; I was going to read my way out of it, and I seemed to have chosen deliberately unsunny books for the task. Over the course of that summer I plowed through novels by Thomas Hardy and George Orwell, Virginia Woolf and Henry James. I knew my family had a vacation in San Diego planned. I took one to England every day.

Whenever I read in the summer now, I remember those hours and hours—as does my skin—on the roof in Sacramento. What a cheap passport those books were, how much they burned the days. At the end of this week, I’m going to a wedding on the beach in Mexico. Today, I’m selecting the books I’ll take. I’m picking carefully, but I notice one thing: There’s not a lick of sunshine in them now, either.

(summer vacation)

10:45 in Tulsa

We just wanted breakfast, but the cop had other ideas

By Michael T. Toole

My dad was a good ol’ boy from Southern Indiana, and he loved taking his competitive neuroses out on the road. Let me explain it for you. He was the kind of guy who took anyone passing him on the road as a personal challenge (“Ain’t no little shit’s gonna get the better of me!”); the right to move first at a four-way stop became a face-off akin to High Noon. You get the point.

I’m thinking now of one of our cross-country treks, this one from Las Vegas to Disney World—and no, flying was not an option. My dad loved to drive and break down destinations into five-minute increments: Phoenix at 1:35, Oklahoma City at 5:10, Shreveport at ...

This trip had us all in our specific roles: My dad was hostile, my mom was working on her crossword puzzles, my older sister, Karen, was listening to her Walkman, and I was indulging in the latest rage for all nebbishy sixth-graders in the summer of ’80, the Rubik’s Cube.

My dad pulled our canary-yellow Cadillac into Tulsa to find a Hardee’s. It was around 10:45 a.m., and breakfast would not be served after 11. This was a universal truth my dad just knew. While that quest was going on, my sister was bored enough to start in on me:

“You actually spent money on a book to help you solve that? You’re such a dweeb!”

“Shut up, Karen!”

“Seriously, you’re better off peeling the stickers off and rearranging them.”

“What don’t you listen to your crappy music on that—”

“All right, already!” Now it was my mother’s turn. “If you kids want to be useful, you’ll help me find a six-letter word for ...”

“Ah, hell!”

My dad was being pulled over by a motorcycle cop. For roughly 60 seconds, my dad just stared ruefully at the rearview mirror while the cop dismounted and walked over. He tapped on the window, which my dad reluctantly cranked down.

“What’s the problem, officer?”

“You were going 35 in a school zone.”

“Yeah, but the sign said slow down when children are present, otherwise it’s 35.”

“The children are present, sir!”

“Where? I don’t see any children.”

My dad was right—there were no children in sight, and the parking lot at the school looked empty. In fact, the scene looked more deserted than a suburban shopping mall on Super Bowl Sunday. But the cop kept reiterating mindlessly.

“The children are present!”

“It’s the goddamn summer, there are no children here!”

“Ever heard of summer school?”

The officer’s sarcastic tone was all it took.

 “Yeah, I’ve heard of summer school. I also know that kids shouldn’t be running around at a quarter ’til 11. It’s too late for recess and too early for lunch. In my day, they had truant officers for that shit. And another thing, that sign should read 25 in a school zone. To say when children are present is just goddamn entrapment. You just wanna see how much shit I’ll take!”

Here, the officer attempted to match my dad with the man-up.

“Sir, if your family wasn’t present—”

“You’d what?” my dad interrupted.

The officer just handed him his ticket.

“I ain’t payin’ this.”

“Oh, you’ll pay it, sir.”

The officer was right; my dad always paid his driving fines.

The officer got back on his bike and went back to his hiding place. We remained silent for the next few minutes until my dad stopped hyperventilating. He had only this reflection:

“Remember, kids, they might have the power, but always go down swinging and be a pain in the ass when you can. Son of a bitch didn’t even have the courtesy to take off his sunglasses while talking to me!”

The story has a happy ending, of sorts: We found a Hardee’s with just a minute to spare. And my dad got his breakfast.

(summer temps)

Sun city

That’s me, crazy from the heat

By Scott Dickensheets

Come June 1 every year, I’m done. Crispy on the outside, cooked in my own juices inside. June 1, people! That still leaves eight months of summer to endure. Henry James called summer afternoon “the two most beautiful words in the English language,” but then, as Wikipedia tells us, “it is an unresolved question as to whether [James] ever experienced a consummated sexual relationship,” so I don’t think we can take his word for any damn thing, much less the nature of heat. Let’s see him spend a summer afternoon driving in Las Vegas, then get all rhapsodic when his hands melt to the steering wheel.

Frankly, I thought I was tougher than Henry James. (For one thing, I’ve experienced consummation.) I grew up here, 35 sun-baked years and counting. You’d think that would’ve given me an industrial-strength cooling system and skin like a space shuttle’s, able to withstand the scorch of atmospheric reentry. But, any more, summer afternoons just sap me, brother. Used to be I could hang in until mid-July before collapsing into a sweat coma. Not now. I think it’s an age thing—as more and more of my programming shorts out, I’m extra vulnerable to what I was once impervious to.

Last year was the worst yet: I found myself cringing into every wisp of shade, standing under any tree with half a branch until a passing cloud threw down enough sun-block for me to scoot on. Every sweat gland became a gusher, a billion welling pipelines that heralded the arrival of two-shirts-a-day season. Unhinged by heat that won’t abate, not even at night—on any of a dozen midnights, I went outside and broke a sweat by just standing there—you stop thinking straight, telling yourself maybe I should sidle up to that blonde; maybe I should buy an expensive new car because it has better A/C; maybe I should get in touch with that deposed finance minister from Nigeria who keeps e-mailing. The freeway became a daily exercise in anger management—by September I had a hoarse voice and a freakishly dexterous middle finger. (You say crime rises during the summer? Really?) Dylan sang it just right: “All I feel is heat and flame and all I see are dark eyes.” (Now there’s a guy who’s had some sex.)

Heat, flame, dark eyes—that’s no way to live, and at least one guy I know retired early and moved to Oregon to get away from it. I don’t have that option, so I’m reduced to eyeing June 1 on the calendar and buying extra shirts.