I Don't Have a Happy Place (5 page)

Greg Evigan was an actor on television, and who knew how long that gig would last, so best to have his next project on hand. The red Trapper Keeper on my desk was stuffed with lined loose-leaf, which I smoothed out and then stared at for a while. I would author a play. It would be a two-character vehicle. The boy character would be the star of a very popular TV show whose car breaks down outside a girl's house. The girl would be lonely and sad and unattractive and bored. She was twenty-eight and a shut-in with glasses and a neck brace and had nothing to do after school.

I started writing dialogue but everything sounded dumb. Each attempt resulted in a crumpled ball of paper. I needed inspiration. Walking into my parents' room, I opened a few drawers, but nothing spoke to me. In Ace's room, I sat at his desk, smelled the rubber band that held his hockey cards together. I took the briefcase out, just to hear the clicks one more time. When I saw those girls staring up at me again, the Lite-Brite pegs in my brain lit up.

MITCH:
Hi. My car broke down, as you can see. I was wondering if I could come in the house to use your telephone.

ROXANNE
(
looking for car, pushes up glasses and adjusts neck brace
): Are you crazy? I can't let you in my house. I don't know you.

MITCH:
Don't you know who I am?

ROXANNE:
Are you Ted Bundy?

MITCH:
Don't be crazy.

ROXANNE:
Wait. My glasses are smudgy. I can't see that well.

MITCH:
I can help you clean them.

ROXANNE:
I guess you can come in and screw me with your
pee
-nus.

MITCH:
Right on. Why don't you tell me about yourself?

ROXANNE
(
taking off her glasses and neck brace
): I like badminton and kittens. But I hate rude people.

MITCH:
I am not rude. I have a penis.

ROXANNE:
All right. Let's screw.

I should note here that I had a friend whose father was a world-class pervert and, in his nightstand, on any given day, lived a bag of dried apricots and a stack of literature we could never bring ourselves to look at. But at the top of the pile was always a
Screw
magazine. Her older brother told us what it meant. And although I never actually leafed through one of them, they still managed to inspire what I imagined could very well become my new smash hit:
Win a Screw with Mitch!

5:03 p.m.

My play was shaping up nicely but missing one thing: actors. If you had written a dirty play and needed some actors to try out some of the smuttier dialogue, who would you call? Exactly.
Barbie
. I
mean, who better to talk about screwing, right? But here is just another way Phil Donahue bankrupted my childhood (see tenet 4).

I did own one big doll, Mrs. Beasley, the same one Buffy toted around on
Family
Affair
. She wore a dowdy turquoise dress with yellow pin dots, and square plastic glasses, and she had a string at her waist that, when pulled, made her utter creepy sayings like, “Gracious me, you are getting to be a big girl.” There is no way Mrs. Beasley could pull off the role of Roxanne. Even if you yanked that string as hard as you could, she would never agree to a screw with Mitch.

Rifling around my closet, I found an old shoebox. Inside lived the tiny loopholes my mother found in the Phil Donahue doctrine, when she couldn't take one more minute of my crusade. Enter the Sunshine Family: Steve, Stephanie, and Baby Sweets. I could guarantee that the calico dress–wearing, frizzy-haired Stephanie and turtleneck-clad Steve never screwed. Baby Sweets most probably came from the stork, even though
Where Did I Come From
? begged to differ. But they were the only actors I could get and this play needed work. Stripping the puritans, rehearsals began.

5:07 p.m.

I tried. Really I did. But those two just couldn't handle the material. I ripped their limbs off in frustration, decapitated them, then placed all the pieces back into the shoebox, along with the pages of
Win a Screw with Mitch!
, closed it up, and wrote
Ted Bundy was here
on the box top. To the back of the closet they went, laid to rest until decades later, when my parents would sell the house and hire someone to host a garage sale for them. To hell with
B.J. and
the Bear
. I don't even know why I bothered. Shutting my closet door, I skulked back to the den and watched the end of
The Merv Griffin Show
until I heard my father's car in the garage.

Epilogue

I spent the rest of my latchkey days alone, just watching TV. Grandpa Solly never returned after that first day, and I insisted on my mother buying me a fire extinguisher for when the house spontaneously combusted. Shortly after turning fifteen, I adopted a bald black Cabbage Patch Kid named Cedric Imala and set up an Easy-Bake Oven on my dresser. Sure, I was too old for those things, but Nana had slipped me a little extra Hanukah money and told me to spend it any way I saw fit.

The ‘80s breezed in with its shoulder pads and Aussie Mega hairspray. The styles were changing yet again and it was all the rage to look as if you lived on
Knots Landing
—this intrigued my mother. She started upturning shirt collars and shellacking her hair into a helmet that could withstand damaging winds. She ditched the ties but kept the slacks. Eventually, Phil Donahue became background noise as she outlined her lips with magenta liner, filling in the rest with bubble gum–pink lipstick.

I still came home to an empty house after school but, sometimes, I'd bring a boy with me. We'd retire to my Duran Duran–postered room and he'd wait patiently as I pressed my nose up to the plastic window, watching my cake rise halfheartedly as it baked by light bulb. Later, we'd listen to Styx's
“Mr. Roboto” and dry hump on the shag rug. Occasionally I'd make eye contact with Cedric Imala and think,
Fuck you, Phil Donahue
.
Fuck you
.

Eight Weeks

• • • • • •

W
e had name tags sewn into our underwear, rations of Fun Dip and Wacky Packs ready for barter. Oversized white envelopes were dispatched months in advance, sending us to doctors for shots and signatures assuring the authorities we weren't bedwetters or asthmatics or prone to epileptic fits. While snow still piled on the roof, my mother tacked the clothing checklist onto the fridge with a sheep magnet that claimed
EWES NOT FAT, EWES FLUFFY!
, and still we scrambled last minute for the requisite four pairs of shorts, three bathing suits, and one rain poncho. I knew other kids, whose duffel bags and cardboard trunks aired out on lawns around the neighborhood, were bubbling like soda inside a shaken can. But as I sat on my bed, bangs hacked and crooked, I hoped that I'd contract the plague—or at the very least get hit by a truck—anything, really, so that I didn't have to get on that bus to summer camp.

I was five years old the first time I stood in the maze of sleepaway camp buses looming in the parking lot of Blue Bonnets Raceway. In its 1950s heyday, my father told me, the horse track boasted a million-dollar clubhouse for “big shots.” I liked
to imagine the short mustachioed man from Monopoly with his wife (a much taller broad, with her long neck wrapped in a beady-eyed fox stole) on a night out, away from the fast dealings and headaches of Marvin Gardens. But by the late ‘70s, the track had long since lost its luster. Now the only thoroughbreds parading around its parking lot had long curly brown hair, wore satin dolphin shorts, and answered to the names Elissa and Elana and Elyse.

Summer camps were invented in the hopes of bringing nature and outdoor pursuits to kids living in the dingy conditions of industrialized cities, the earliest Fresh Air Fund spots. By the 1920s, hundreds of summer camps had sprouted on the American landscape. I'm sure Canada adopted the idea, copying its cousin a year or two after the fact. It took us longer to get everything up north. If the camps I went to were considered Jewish camps, I had no clue. Yes, we wore white to dinner on Friday evenings and there was challah bread on the table, but it didn't occur to us that camp was religious any more than it occurred to us that the stop-motion
Davey and Goliath
show we all watched on Sunday mornings had a lick to do with Christianity. We just liked the way the dog sounded when he said “Daaaaavey.”

Camp is a time to connect. In its wooded magical glory, one could make lifelong pals while sleeping in tinderboxes, surrounded by the Magic Marker graffiti of ghosts of campers past. It is a place where character takes shape. There is positive transformation and blossoming and good old-fashioned fun. In the 1970s, summer camps were still affordable and kids were sent in droves for a myriad of reasons. For those who struggled during the school year, camp could be a time for reinvention. It was fully possible to be a math nerd in the fall and a color war champion in the hotter months. For some, camp was a safe place to take on authority, others felt free enough to explore their sexuality on the
baseball field or over by Canoeing. Of course, there were your garden-variety well-adjusted kids, the ones who were equally successful at home and away.

And then there was
that
kid. You know who I mean. The underdog who gets on the bus weeping and shy and scared but, against all odds, learns to rise to occasions and come out of her shell, making the best of everything, and by the end of the eight weeks picks up awards and plaques and skills and lifelong friends and lessons for the storybooks. Aww, don't you like that kid the best? Who doesn't love a kid who overcomes obstacles because she tries harder than anyone and it actually pays off? Me. I can't stand that fucking kid. Not to worry, this isn't a story about that kid.

Our cabin was a small wooden structure, painted white with dark green trim. It sat in a neat row of identical cabins on one side of a line of trees, the boys' bunkhouses mirroring the setup on the other side of the divide. Eight Shaker-style pegs outside the screen door held our rain ponchos, and the wooden porch was smooth enough for jacks. The dining hall's and rec hall's white-and-green exteriors mimicked the cabins', these larger buildings flanking the small lake at opposite ends, like parentheses.

Save for a go-cart track, it was pretty standard camp stuff. Activities ranged from softball to sailing to archery, and once a week we had a special activity called Coke Dips, which all campers lived for. While we slept, cans of Cott soda were thrown into the shallow and deep ends of the lake. As the sun rose, a voice would burst through the PA system calling “the Dip,” causing mass hysteria as everyone scrambled out of their cabins, beelining toward the lake. If you were lucky enough to catch yourself a can, you gave it to your counselor, who brought it to the kitchen staff. At lunch that day, you were allowed to drink the entire
can, instead of the bug juice that gurgled in those bubbling drink contraptions they also had at the mall.

There were five kids in my cabin that year. It was unprecedented to have such young kids sleeping away at camp for the entire eight weeks, so a special cabin was carved out just for us. We were made camp mascots just by virtue of being small. But even with all the special attention, a lot of us cried ourselves to sleep while clutching stuffed Snoopys, thinking of home.

For just about everyone, Camp Hiawatha was an oasis, perfection on earth. Today, way over thirty years later, many of those campers still refer to their tenure there as the best days of their lives. My memory for details of that time is tangled; I vaguely recall being in the chorus of
You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown
and a male swim instructor named Leslie pointing out a can of grape soda for my retrieval on a Coke Dip. What I remember more was traveling in a small pack of campers, being led to sporty activities I already found challenging. I wasn't homesick, because I didn't feel any more at ease back there. Being part of a pack, encouraged to participate, all that fun—I think I just felt lost.

“This is great,” my father said, eating fried chicken out of a cardboard box on visiting day, his golden Capricorn necklace pendant catching the sun and memories of his own days at camp. “Man, you guys are lucky.”

Maybe I was just too young to appreciate it, so my parents continued sending me off, just to make sure.

•   •   •

I started kindergarten the fall just after my first trip to sleepaway camp. It was a French school, housed in a large brick building that loomed over a busy residential street in Montreal. The brochure was on top of a mail stack in the kitchen and its cover featured what I believed to be a mental institution for smiling
girls dressed in dark navy uniforms. Those tunics are what sold my mother. She believed in the idea of uniforms, convinced our future relationship would never be in jeopardy if we took fighting about what to wear out of the equation.

My mother brought me to school the first day, holding my hand as we crossed the threshold. The teacher stood en garde by the door, her brown wool pencil skirt static-clinging to nude panty hose. Twenty-eight kids seized the classroom dressed in kind: gray pants and white shirts for the boys, navy pleated tunics with white shirts underneath for us. I could hear kids speaking French and learned at once that no English was spoken in the classroom, which made my stomach hurt because no French was spoken in my home.

The classroom was set up with a series of tables along one side, facing a line of windows. Under the patches of light the windows let in was a domestic-style setup: a play kitchen with a fridge and oven and fake food and a small wooden washer and dryer and play ironing board with a pile of teeny rumpled clothes. I couldn't take my eyes off it. My mother's eyes were concealed behind the prescription sunglasses she'd neglected to replace with appropriate indoor eyewear. Sometimes I'd feel proud of her wearing dark glasses inside, like she was a rock star, but on the first day of French school, the kids were staring at her and I wanted her to be like everyone else. Although I couldn't see her eyes, her craned neck suggested she was checking out the small tub of hard candies sequestered on a high shelf near the door, and I'd soon figure out that on good-behavior days, Madame Larousse would give us each a sour ball to eat on the way home. If you sucked them dutifully, small shards would form and cut your tongue. I liked that part best.

We all took seats at the table. Most of the parents had left by that point, but my mother stood behind me, dark glasses
in position, looking like my bodyguard. Some kids are naturally attractive, have an ease about them that others gravitate toward. I sat in my chair looking straight ahead, wooden, just like my mother. We were the dream team of people repellent. The teacher nodded at my mother, which was code for
It's time to leave your kid here with me in this French mental institution
. Understanding it was time to go, my mother scanned the room for someone to pair me up with so she could leave without my having some sort of emotional breakdown, or worse, having one of her own.

Already sitting next to me was a little redheaded girl, all freckles and good posture. My mother crouched down in between us. “Hello,” she said, in her signature baby voice. “What's your name?”

The small girl looked at my mother, possibly
through
my mother, and ignored her. I immediately knew her angelic little Peppermint Patty face was a big ruse.

“Name?” My mother tried again in a tougher tone this time, staring at the kid until she finally, in a standoffish voice, answered, “Anne.”

My mother gave me an isn't-this-fabulous look and stood up tall again. She hugged me from behind, my arms hanging to my knees as she gripped. To her, she'd made contact, broken the ice for me, and was now free to leave the building. I could hear her heels click and echo down the long hallway, leaving me alone with Anne, who spoke only French, and certainly not to me. I stared at the washing machine, counting down the seconds until I could line up at the door and receive my sour ball—hopefully, not the lime one.

I spent the first few weeks alone. Not (only) because I didn't speak the language, but because I had no clue how to make a friend. I'd come home after school every day and eat from the
box of Fruity Pebbles I'd hidden in my closet, trying to come up with a plan so I didn't have to spend the rest of my days at the wooden washing machine alone. How did people do it? How did they make friends? The next morning, as I moped around the classroom, it finally hit me: find the kid who looks as miserable and uncomfortable as I do.

Gerald Wiener was round and short and a dead ringer, at six, for Walter Matthau. He often complained of back pain and spent half the week barfing in the classroom sink. His face was in a perpetual squint, making him look like a human whine. Not even his nana would call that kid happy. This was my guy.

At nap time, I'd place my sleeping mat next to his and we'd look up Madame Larousse's skirt as she paced along the row of foamy floor covers. Gerald started coming to my ballet recitals, even though he reminded us at all times that the lights gave him a headache. He was quiet, and often nauseous, but shared with me his hatred for kindergarten at the French institution, and confided that he, too, would rather have been at home watching
T
he
Flintstones
. When it was time to go home, we'd line up for sour balls together, our heads hung equally low, defeated by the day. We'd roll our eyes instead of saying goodbye, knowing there was no way out of returning to that shit hole the following morning. But at least we had each other.

•   •   •

I took my crackerjack friend-making skills, along with my Yes & Know pads, to the second summer camp I attended—this time in Middlebury, Vermont. I was now eight years old. This camp had dark-green cabins with white trim, and the boys' lodgings were behind the tennis courts. Although this place was much larger, as if the American camp had eaten the Canadian one, it might just as well have been the same place. Canoes, flagpoles, bug juice,
beautiful senior girls named Randy and Donna with long hair and suede clogs, and days full of scheduled activities. We captured the flag in the morning, moving on to lanyard making, and then archery before lunch. Rest hours were spent playing jacks and trading stationery, or quietly devouring Archie comics instead of writing letters home.

The Canadian girls shared their Laura Secord lollipops; the Americans gave away small handfuls of the sour-apple gum we couldn't get in our towns. As summer came to a close, color war broke out, splitting the camp in two, testing mettle, seeing who could win more games or sing songs louder or, in the end, have the most spirit. When it was over, there was much sitting by the lake, usually with something burning in effigy on the water, as campers sang the last of their songs, drooping, because the best time of their lives was ending. How could they leave? Who would understand what they'd just experienced when they returned home and unzipped their duffels, which now contained everlasting memories that their mothers would just throw into the washing machine, as if it were that easy.

I knew that no matter how many sad sack letters I sent home begging for someone to spring me from this camp, unless I contracted the mumps I was there for the duration. Girls were already sharing their Bay City Rollers T-shirts and having the prescribed fun. It was time to find my rotten apple.

Amy Schecter was short and spunky with a giant supply of sour-apple gum. And while she was sporty like a lot of the Americans and I gravitated toward rest hour and doing the plays, Amy seemed pissed off all the time, and that was as good an invitation as any. My attitude was worse than hers, but Amy kept up all right. We'd sit on her top bunk while the rest of the girls played jacks, sneering at their squeals of delight when they'd won a game or danced with a boy at a social. Often we'd
be warned by our counselors in meetings on the porch or the baseball field to improve our behavior or attitude or else. Amy listened more than I did, worried about jeopardizing her sporty status. Eventually I found myself in my first meeting with the camp director.