Fun Camp (9 page)

Read Fun Camp Online

Authors: Gabe Durham

Tags: #youth activities, #Summer, #skits, #Fiction, #Experimental Fiction, #Adolescence

BOOK: Fun Camp

9.37Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub

Read Book Download Book

SUNDAY MORNING

THAT’S IT?

Yeah, Sunday pulls the rug out from everyone. When we wake, there’s always some group from far-off already gone, goodbyes unsaid. We treat Sunday like a full day in our heads all week, but then it comes and it’s just a morning—a morning spent packing. All these suddenly-concerned boys run around looking for plastic bags to keep the moldy wet clothes that’ve been balled under the bed all week from infecting their less-moldy dry clothes. We approach each other, newly sheepish, holding copies of the group photo and sharpies, saying, “Are you going to the Fun Retreat weekend in October? I think I’m going, are you going?” We mop and squint and sing a last song. Then parents start showing up, smiling like they belong. Like they have a clue what went on here. Like they’ve ever felt a thing in their lives.

Dear Mom,

For much of the week, I’d forgotten how slow regular mail is. By the time you get this, I’ll have already been home for three days or so. Please disregard the last few letters. They were hasty. If my room is still available, I’d like to stay. I do ask, however, that you take a look at your schedule so we may set aside an evening when I’ll outline the changes I’d like to see our family implement in the coming quarter, such as you learning to make cornbread and us eating on the porch when it’s nice out and us getting a pool and playing kickball and having food fights and you letting me pick on Deirdre when it’s in a funny way. I look forward to returning to my room, my toys, a bathroom with a lock, and of course, Johannes. I hope you have shown him my pictures as I asked.

With affection,

William

BEST FRIENDS SHOULD BE TOGETHER

We’ll get a pair of those half-heart necklaces so every ask n’ point reminds us we are one glued duo. We’ll send real letters like our grandparents did, handwritten in smart cursive curls. We’ll extend cell plans and chat through favorite shows like a commentary track just for each other. We’ll get our braces off on the same day, chew whole packs of gum. We’ll nab some serious studs but tell each other everything. Double-date at a roadside diner exactly halfway between our homes. Cry on shoulders when our boys fail us. We’ll room together at State, cover the walls floor-to-ceiling with incense posters of pop dweebs gone wry. See how beer feels. Be those funny cute girls everybody’s got an eye on. We’ll have a secret code for hot boys in passing. A secret dog named Freshman Fifteen we’ll have to hide in the rafters during inspection. Follow some jam band one summer, grooving on lawns, refusing drugs usually. Get tattoos that only spell something when we stand together. I’ll be maid of honor in your wedding and you’ll be co-maid with my sister but only cause she’d disown me if I didn’t let her. We’ll start a store selling just what we like. We’ll name our firstborn daughters after one another, and if our husbands don’t like it, tough. Lifespans being what they are, we’ll be there for each other when our men have passed, and all the friends who come to visit our assisted living condo will be dazzled by what fun we still have together. We’ll be the kind of besties who make outsiders wonder if they’ve ever known true friendship, but we won’t even notice how sad it makes them and they won’t bring it up because you and I will be so caught up in the fun, us marveling at how not-good it never was.

THE SUDDEN IMPOSITION OF CHORES

We make the hulks Dismantle the Stage and Stack Benches. To the Least Improved goes Bathroom Duty. The older kids know to call Trash Pickup, which is job code for Make Out in the Woods. For Girls Cabin 1, we put together an algorithm and found that when you factor in the bitching, the required supervision, and how cranky they are from staying up all night comparing the Very Real Talks they’d each had with Tad Gunnick, it actually saves time to exempt them from chores. Really, though, no matter what jobs you give these kids, you’re gonna catch some flack: “Aren’t there people whose
job
it is to mop and shine and sweep and scour?” and “Didn’t we pay
big bucks
to come here?” and “Are we not remarkable precocious youths to be
catered
to?” and “Do we not
deserve
?” All valid points. Cleaning just isn’t on-message. If I had my way, we’d forget all about the security deposit we so sorely need returned and instead would wake the campers the last morning by balloon-pelting them in their unsuspecting bunks, chasing them out of their cabins and onto the rec field where their own arsenal waits, and we’d engage them in an epic campers vs. counselors water balloon bout, have them greet their moms sopping—give those moms a sense of where their money went.

QUESTION

Dave and Holly, how old are you? And is camp like your whole job all year or is there other stuff?

THE MISSING LINES

I was checking the clothesline for warm fuzzies when I noticed Tad Gunnick climbing up on the bench Dave stands on to make announcements, and there a small crowd of us gathered around him.

“What do you call a cheese that isn’t yours?” Tad asked us. We began to respond, but he continued. “Why did the chicken cross the road? Where do bats get their energy? Knock, knock, who’s there, the interrupting cow. How do you know when a blonde has been making chocolate chip cookies? How many hucksters does it take to screw in a light bulb? Two guys are getting drunk at the top of a very tall building and one says to the other, ‘I bet you I can jump out the window, fly around, and come back safe.’ Yo mama’s so fat. You might be a redneck if. What’s Lorena Bobbitt’s favorite kind of soda? What do you call a dog that can tell time?”

After awhile, some campers among us began to grumble.
Who is this Tad Gunnick,
we wondered,
who offers jokes and withholds the punchlines?
Tad guessed at our concern and said, “The time will soon come when I am no longer here and you will have to provide your own punchlines.”

“But why, Tad?” one said.

“Where will you go?” said another.

Tad answered, “Arizona State,” and slipped away from us in the confusion.

DOWN THE MOUNTAIN

Kids come to me in their little tears, wanting to know one thing: “How do I take Fun Camp down the mountain, Chaplain Bernadette?” You come here and have this literally mountaintop experience then go home again to your old friends, your old neighbors, your old parents, them ready to snatch you back into old boring habits. Well don’t you let them! You can water balloon bombard from any tower in this nation. You can whittle Mom a totem in your room any winter Sunday. On inner city sidewalks you can nature hike through the machete-blazed footpaths of your own minds. You can joke like Tad. You can skit on the street. Be Fun Camp to your commute-weary parents, Fun Camp to your grave mustachioed principal, Fun Camp to the salt-of-the-earth cigarette flickers loitering up and down the promenade. All of them saying, “Sweep this mess! Read this book! Do this math problem!” Kids, what pleasure has an exciting person ever gleaned proofing an obtuse? The proof’ll be all around you! If you keep your heart locked up in a camp that knows best, no authority’s got a chance. Now turn in your songbooks to page 12, “We Are the Champions,” and really focus on the words, really knowing in the heart of your heart that we win. As we stand. And as we sing.

ONE WEEK

One week? So many sticky memories in such a disposable duration seems impossible. In seventy-five years, you’ll be grizzled on some hospital bed, leaning too hard on memories to divert you from a slow death, struggling to recall your husband’s name, hard-pressed to find a memory about which you can confidently say, “That was in my thirties,” but speaking in complete paragraphs about the boy you met when he came plowing into you at kickball, about when you yelled “gin!” during Spades and made him laugh, about the conspiratorial lunch table whispers you and his friends shared over whether he’d be your boyfriend, about the stiff goodbye when he left a night early to get to an aunt’s wedding, about the cheek peck he gave you, and about the note to him you’d folded into your sock. A note that scratched your ankle with each step as you went to meet him and again on the way back. His mom was watching from the car, smiling weird. You were from the city and camp was your first time seeing a real night sky. “I never told you all this, Dad,” old you will say to your old husband. “I kept it a secret.” But you’ve told him for years. He eggs you on cause he sees how you love to tell it, how each time you think of it, it’s a revelation, a gift you got you.

Gabe Durham’s writings have appeared in
Hobart, Mid-American Review, Quarterly West, The Rumpus, The Lifted Brow, DIAGRAM
, and an apocalyptic anthology called
Last Night on Earth
. He edited
Keyhole Magazine
and
Dark Sky Magazine
. Gabe lives in Los Angeles, CA, and
FUN CAMP
is his first book.