20. Religious Camp

My parents went on a vacation trip to Hawaii and sent my brother and me to sleepway camp. My parents had gotten the camp’s name from the Presbyterian Church, but I don’t think they realized how religious it was going to be. At this camp, three times a day, following meals, there were prayer meetings. Sometimes you were supposed to pray alone, and sometimes the counselors led the prayers. The counselors talked about how the most important thing was to admit your sins, how if you admitted your sins and allowed Jesus into your heart then God sees you through a special kind of glasses that makes your sins disappear so you can enter the kingdom of heaven. After the dinner prayer meeting, we all read the Bible. If a counselor came by and you weren’t reading the Bible, if you were reading another book or writing a letter, they would give you a hard time. Ask if you didn’t love God, if that was the reason you were offending Him.

My brother and I were at the same camp, but he was in the younger kid’s program. I only saw him a few times, in passing at dinner or full-camp events. From what he described, his program wasn’t nearly as religious as mine.

Most of the other kids in my program were inner city kids. There was some sort of deal where they could go to this camp at no expense to them. Their churches paid for it. I would have had trouble fitting in anyway, since I was a quiet and this was my first time away from home for such a long period of time, but with these kids I was totally on the outside. When my parents called on the third day or so, long distance from Honolulu, I happened to mention that all my bunkmates were black. My father got mad at that. He must have made a few phone calls, because by that night the bunks had been switched around. A couple of the black guys had been moved out, and a white guy moved in. The other black guys weren’t happy with the changes. They’d all been getting along just fine.

“There must have been complaints from parents,” our bunk’s head counselor, whose name was Ross, explained. He was white, as were all the other counselors.

“Complaints about what?” the black guys asked. “Who complained? Who can we complain to?”

We were all sitting around, after quiet time at night, talking about this. I was right there.

“Various complaints,” Ross said. “This is the way it is. No more complaints.”

“Whose parents complained?” the black guys kept asking, but Ross wouldn’t tell them. The black guys must have suspected it was mine. I waited for one of them to say something. But they never did, that I heard.

The other white guy’s name was Fred. We became friends, mostly because we just ended up together. Fred was big on the camp candy store. The candy store was open only an hour a day, in the afternoon between two and three o’clock. Fred went every day. He described to me the different candies he bought, why one candy bar was better than another. He had various strategies for getting the best candies in the store. You had to be there at least an hour early, Fred told me, if you wanted to guarantee a good spot in line.

On Sunday night at the end of the first week, the founder of the camp gave a sermon to everyone, including the younger kids. He had a TV show, and there were cameras all over the place recording him as he spoke to us. He was a short man with silver hair, and a very dynamic speaker. He never stopped moving. We sang songs he had written, hymns that were published in a little book they had given us when we arrived at camp. The counselors had been coaching us in these songs, so we could impress the founder. We all sang our hearts out, and the founder gave us a beaming smile that must have looked great on television.

After the sermon and songs, the founder said that anyone who’d been moved by the spirit of the Lord should go outside and be saved. The counselors were waiting, and if we felt the call, they would save us. That first night, only a few people went, but on the nights that followed the counselors asked again, and more and more people went, even after sermons nowhere near as good as the one the founder had given.

A few of the campers left after a week, and others after two weeks. Those of us who stayed the third week got to go on an overnight camping trip. It was a miserable day, drizzly and cold. The black guys complained about the backpacks we had to carry, and then when we made camp about the terrible dinner the counselors made for us. I didn’t complain, but that was only because I was still feeling shy. I hated the hiking and the food, too.

The next day we went mountain climbing, and there was an accident. A guy named Red got hit in the head with a rock that was dislodged by the foot of someone up a litter higher than him. The rock had gone right over my shoulder, before it hit Red.

I knew Red, but only by sight. He was tall, and had reddish hair. It was actually closer to blonde. He was one of the three or four other white guys in the camp, besides Fred and me.

The counselors immediately stopped the trip. Two of them herded us back down the mountain, and the others clustered around Red. We practically ran down that hill. The counselors yelled at anyone who said a word. We came out on a road, and one of the counselors went to make phone calls. There was a beautiful, vast lake on the other side of the road. It seemed to go on forever, right to the edge of the horizon and beyond.

Soon the other counselors came down from the mountain, carrying Red. There was a shirt around his head, stained red with blood. An ambulance pulled up and took Red, and an hour later a bus from the camp came for us. “Red’s okay,” they told us when we were on the bus. “But you have to pray for him. He needs your prayers right now.”

The bus was silent the whole ride back.

The night, after sermon, we all got together for a special session in the main meeting room, and the counselors took turns telling us what a great guy Red was. They talked about how he never complained and always had a smile on his face. They told us Red’s parents had been notified, and they were trusting the Lord to guide them. They told us to pray for Red’s parents as we prayed for Red. Red’s counselor was the last one to speak, and began to cry as he described how he’d just witnessed for Red a day or two before. Red’s counselor was my favorite counselor in the camp. He went jogging every morning, and if you wanted to go with him, you tied a sock to your bed and he woke you up. I’d done it a couple of times.

Back in our bunk, my counselor Ross led us in some more prayers. “Lord, help us know what you mean to show us by this,” Ross said. “Help us know that it could have been any of us this happened to.” “It should have been Fred, not Red,” one of the black guys sang as he took a shower before bed, but without rancor in his voice, more because he enjoyed the rhyme.

The next morning, they told us Red had pulled through. The counselor who’d carried Red down told us the details of what had happened. He said he hadn’t wanted to until he was sure Red was going to be all right.

“Red stopped breathing,” the counselor said. “Red’s face turned color, it turned blue. And that’s when I called on the Lord for help. That’s when I asked the Lord to please, please help. And He did. The Lord was with us on that mountain.”

We took up a collection for Red’s family. Fred put all his candy money in, everything he’d been saving for the rest of the trip. It looked like around twenty dollars.

Two nights later, when they asked that people who wanted to be saved go outside, I went. I’d been wanting to go ever since the day of Red’s accident, but I didn’t want it to seem like I was going because of Red’s accident. I wanted it to seem like my own decision.

The night was warm, and there was a bright moon. Out on the lawn, there were pairs of counselors and kids. The counselors were doing most of the talking. The counselor I’d gone outside with had wire rim glasses. He asked me questions about God and my life. Yes, I answered, yes, yes, yes. He hugged me after we were done and then laughed and hugged me again. “Chris was saved tonight, praise the Lord,” Ross said, when I got back to my bunk that night. All the black guys gave me high fives.

The day before we were to leave, a group of us who’d been saved went by bus to a nearby city to proselytize. None of us knew what that meant, but they explained it to us. We split up into groups of two when we got to the city. It was Fred and me. We stopped people and asked them if they were interested in being happy. Then we asked them if they knew what it felt like to be free. The counselors had told us the questions to ask. Most people listened up until the time we showed our Bibles. Then they got an uncomfortable smiles on their faces, began edging away. One guy called us Moonies and cursed at us for wasting his time. But there was one woman who wasn’t even that much older than us, maybe high school age, who listened to everything we had to say. She didn’t let us witness for her, but she did take all our pamphlets and said she’d think hard about what we’d said.

One the way back to camp on the bus we told the counselors our experiences and sang the founder’s songs as loud as we could, until our throats ached.

The next day my parents came. I didn’t tell them about any of this. But I thought about it a lot, in the weeks afterward.

The more I thought about it, the angrier I became. I’d been brainwashed, I told myself. They’d hounded me until I didn’t know what I was doing and taken advantage of my feelings of being alone and my fears about Red and then they’d used them to make me go out and do something humiliating like telling people on the street about Jesus. My skin crawled whenever I thought about myself doing that.

But I knew I wasn’t blameless. I’d wanted to do it, and I’d felt good as I’d been doing it. Really good, like I was part of something so much bigger than me.

I resented the camp for that, too:  for making me feel like there was something bigger than me I could be a part of.

About two months later, I got a letter from Ross. He wrote that he’d been thinking of me, and how important it was that I keep up my Bible reading and spreading of the word of God. He encouraged me to write back, and even included his phone number if I ever wanted to talk.

I was going to tear the letter up, but then I got a better idea. I put it back in the envelope, and on the back of the envelope I wrote everything I could remember of what that guy on the street who’d called us Moonies had said to Fred and me. Then I put the letter in another envelope and mailed it to back to Ross.

It didn’t make me feel any better. But it did stop him from ever writing me again.

19. Cool Kids

We were in art class, painting political posters. I was sitting at the George McGovern table. There were three of us there. There were two kids at the Richard Nixon table. The rest of the class was at what our art teacher, Mr. Reiss, called the “Silent Majority Table.” At the start of class, Mr. Reiss had asked us who we would vote for if we could vote, and when hardly anyone raised their hands he’d gotten very angry. “All right,” he said. “You all want to be ignorant, go ahead. You can sit there and think nothing and do nothing. That’s exactly perfect for this country.”

Mr. Reiss wouldn’t even let the silent majority table people do free drawing. They just had to sit and be silent.

I didn’t know much about George McGovern, but I knew I would vote for him. I’d overheard my parents talking one night, and they’d been saying how they both voted for Nixon in 1968 and thought it was the worst mistake of their lives. My father said he didn’t like McGovern very much, but anyone, anyone, had to be better than Nixon. My mother said McGovern wasn’t so bad.

“And when he said, like, ‘squeal like a pig,’ that was so sick, I thought I would throw up,” one of the other kids at the George McGovern table said. This other kid’s name was Steven Pelton. “That was one fucking sick movie.”

“Creepy, though,” the third kid at the table, Dave Owen, answered. “That kid with banjo, he was fucking creepy.”

Steven Pelton and Dave Owen were cool kids. They dressed in the best clothes, went to parties on weekends given by their older brothers. They drew motorcycles on their notebooks and coasted by in class without doing much work. Even the teachers liked them. They were also the best looking boys in class. Dave Owen in particular had these feminine good looks, like a singer, like Bobby Sherman. All the girls were crazy about him.

Normally I wouldn’t have tried to talk to them, but I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

“You guys saw ‘Deliverance’?” I asked.

“Yeah. You see it?”

“No. But I read about it. I read the review in the Times. How did you ever get your parents to take you to that?”

Dave Owen laughed. “My fucking parents. My fucking parents wouldn’t take me to see fucking Bambi.”

Dave Owen said “fuck” a lot, but it always seemed to fit with what he was saying, and he seemed able to say it only when there were no teachers in earshot.

“Did you sneak in?”

“Nah, our friend Bob Decker took us,” Steve Pelton said. “He takes us everywhere.”

“Who’s Bob Decker? Does he go to school here?”

This time they both laughed. “Bob’s not in school,” Steve Pelton said. “He’s older. He’s got his own apartment. He’s got a great stereo, but all he ever plays are the fucking Beatles.”

“You’ve been to his apartment?”

“A few times,” Dave Owen said. I noticed his poster had Richard Nixon’s face, which he’d cut out from a magazine, with a big X through it, and then all kinds of red splotches around it.

“Where’d you meet him?”

“My father works with him,” Steve Pelton said.

“Does your father come with you when you go out with him?” I asked.

“Fuck no,” Dave Owen answered. “Old Bob Decker takes us out all on our own. He takes us any-fucking-where we want to go. All we have to do is call him up and say, ‘Hey Bob Decker, we feel like hanging out at Jamesway,” and he comes driving over and picks us up somewhere. He’ll buy us ice cream, whatever.”

“He gave us beers once,” Steve Pelton said. “At his apartment.”

“You should be…careful,” I said, carefully. I didn’t want them to make fun of me.

Both Steve Pelton and Dave Owen snorted with laughter. “Yeah, we know,” Dave Owen said. “We know that old Bob Decker probably wants to suck our fucking dicks or something. That’s why we can make him do anything we want.”

“One time Dave made him let me drive his car,” Steve Pelton said. “He told Bob Decker he’d tell my father that we’d gone to the movies with me. I don’t think my father would have minded, but Bob Decker just wigged out.”

“He’s not all bad, though,” Dave Owen said. “He says he was at Woodstock. Which may be total bullshit, but he tells some good stories about it. Drugs. Mud.”

“Does he give you drugs?” I asked. Something about the conversation made me feel like I could ask anything. I got the sense that Steve and Dave had been dying to talk to someone, someone not each other, about this. None of us were working on our political posters anymore.

“Nah,” Dave Owen said. “Just those beers that one time. And only one beer each. He wouldn’t give us any more than that.”

“We’ll probably get him to give us more sometime,” Steven Pelton said. “Or at least buy some for us.”

“Probably,” Dave Owen said. “He’s got a poster in his bathroom. Isn’t that cool? It’s like a cartoon poster, of a girl driving in a car, with her hair flying back. It takes up almost the whole wall.”

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t have any more questions.

“He said he’d try to get us into Clockwork Orange this weekend,” Steven Pelton said.  “It’s playing in Newburgh.”

“You know Clockwork Orange, Newsome?” Dave Owen asked.

I nodded. “I’ve seen the ad. It looks awesome.”

Dave and Steve exchanged a glance. “You want to go? I’ll be Bob Decker wouldn’t mind.”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“He’s really not that bad. It’s sort of cool to be around an adult you can boss around. Say anything you fucking want to.”

I nodded no again, quickly. I looked down at my poster. It wasn’t much of a poster, just words, statistics about Vietnam I was copying from a magazine. I was going to write “McGovern Can Save Us” along the bottom, as the tagline.

“No problem,” Dave Owen said, and he was making his voice a teasing voice now, as though the offer had never been real. “We probably won’t get in anyway. That movie is rated fucking X.”

18. At My Cousins’ Apartment in New York

At my cousins’ apartment in New York City, the adults were in the kitchen laughing. I was in the bedroom with my cousin Linda talking about Bobby Sherman. Linda was trying to explain to me why he was so good. She said it was part his voice, and part the good songs he sang, but mostly his personality. She played me one his songs as she showed me a picture from one of her magazines and asked, “You can see it, right? Look at him. He just looks so…nice. You know he would be nice to you, if you met him and talked to him.”

These cousins were from my mother’s side of the family. Linda was just a year older than me, and Ellen was the exact same age as my brother. My mother and my Aunt Jane, my mother’s sister, used to joke about being pregnant at the same time, trying to get around on the subways with a two-year old (me) and three-year old (Linda) also in tow.

My brother and my cousin Ellen were in the bedroom, too, watching television. Ellen yelled to turn it off when Linda played the Bobby Sherman song, even though Linda played it really low so it wouldn’t bother them. I wondered if it would have been worth having to share a bedroom with my brother if it meant we could have our own TV in there.

“I think me and my friends would beat up any boy who wore that necklace thing,” I said to Linda, as I looked at his picture in her magazine.

Linda tsked. “It’s called a choker. And it looks good on him. You’re just making fun.”

“I am,” I admitted to her.

“Yeah, well, how would you like it if I made fun of you with all your monster magazines and stuff.”

“What’s there to make fun of? Monster magazines are cool.”

“Can you guys be quieter?” Ellen called over. “We’re watching this here.”

Linda sighed. “Why don’t we go see what’s going on inside.”

In the kitchen were my mother and my sister and the woman who lived next door, whose name was Tina, and a guy named Steve and his mother who also lived in the building. Steve was about my mother and aunt’s age, but he still lived with and took care of his mother. She was very old and sickly. Steve was telling a story as we walked in, and his mother looked like she was listening but you could tell the words weren’t really registering, that she was just there in body.

I liked Steve. I’d seen him loads of times while I was over at my cousins’ apartment. He seemed to spend a lot of time over there. I actually think I saw him more often than I saw my Uncle Phil.

“So,” Steve was saying. “Jane and I were walking back from the restaurant with the kids, and there’s this guy, he’s just standing there taking a leak on the sidewalk. It’s not even that dark out! And we’re embarrassed, you know, we’re trying to walk by as quickly and quietly as possible, when what does the guy do but turn around as we’re walking by! We must have been so quiet, he didn’t even know we were there, and so he turns around and he’s still going!”

Everyone was laughing again. Linda and I were laughing, too. It felt good to be with the adults, laughing.

“What did you do?” Tina asked.

“We didn’t do anything,” Steve continued. “As soon as the guy saw us, he just froze in mid—in mid, you know, and he started tucking himself in and running away. He was embarrassed too. Only in New York, right?”

“You didn’t say anything to him, Jane?” my mother asked.

Steve answered for her. “Say anything? Jane didn’t have to say anything. It was just love at first sight.”

That got everyone laughing even harder

Just then, my Uncle Phil walked in. He nodded to everyone, pulled a chair from the kitchen table, turned it backwards and sat down. As the laughter died down, he asked, “What’s so funny?”

“Nothing, just a story,” Steve said. “How are you doing, Phil?”

“I’m doing fine. Kind of beat. Long day.”

Uncle Phil was supposed to work as a bartender. But even I knew he had strange hours for bartender. Sometimes he worked in the middle of the afternoon, sometimes the middle of the night. Whenever we visited Linda and Ellen, he was always just showing up. No one knew ever knew if he was going to be around or not. He hardly ever came to visit us up in Monroe; Aunt Jane and Linda and Ellen usually took the train. I don’t think my father and Uncle Phil liked each other very much.

“You all staying over tonight?” Uncle Phil asked my mother.

“Yes,” she said quickly. “Just for the one night.”

Everyone always acted like this around Uncle Phil, kind of nervous. Which was funny, since Phil was a short, wiry guy, not someone you’d expect everyone would be scared of.

“That’s fine,” Uncle Phil said, and stood up abruptly. “You know, I think I’m going to take a shower. I really am beat.”

“We can leave…” Steve began.

“No, no, stay,” Uncle Phil said. “You know me. I can sleep through anything.”

This was true. There were some visits we’d made to Linda and Ellen where we’d been over there the whole afternoon, talking and yelling and laughing, and I’d never even known Uncle Phil was asleep in the bedroom.

 Uncle Phil walked over to the refrigerator, got himself a beer. He paused for a second in the kitchen doorway. “Okay then, enjoy it, anyway” Uncle Phil  said to everyone, and laughed. That was another thing about Uncle Phil, he was always saying weird little things that made no sense to me but he thought were really funny.

Once we all heard the shower water running, everyone calmed down and started laughing and telling stories again. I was remembering the last time I’d seen my Uncle Phil, which was about two months before, in our kitchen back at home. My brother and I were walking home from the bus stop after school and I’d seen a car I didn’t recognize parked out front. When we walked in he was there, and my brother instantly asked where Linda and Ellen were, but he said no, he’d just come up by himself for a little visit. He left almost immediately, after a few squirmy minutes where he asked us how school was going.

I found out later what had happened, from listening in on my parents when they thought I was asleep. Uncle Phil had hit my Aunt Jane, and she’d thrown him out of the house. He’d driven all the way up to Monroe to try to get my mother to convince my Aunt Jane to take him back.

“He was crying, Jack,” my mother said to my father, while I listened from my bedroom. “He was sitting right there in front of me, crying.”

“Do what you want to do,” my father answered. “But it’s not the first time, is it?”

I came back to the conversation in the kitchen. Tina, the next-door neighbor, was telling a funny story about a bum who’d lived in the lobby of her old building for over two years. Everyone, even the super, liked him so much that no one could tell him to leave. I looked around the table: everyone was smiling, shaking their heads. Even Steve’s mother seemed to be enjoying the story.

I slipped out to go to the bathroom. I’d had to go for the last half hour, but hadn’t wanted to miss any of the funny stories. But I couldn’t hold it any longer.

“Hey,” a voice called out as I was returning to the kitchen. “Hey, Chris. Come in here for a second. Sit down for a second.”

It was Uncle Phil. He was in the living room with the lights out, sipping on his beer. I came in, sat on the far end of the couch from him.

“You like music, don’t you?” he asked.

I said yes, although I didn’t know how he’d know if I liked music or anything else.

“I heard this on the radio today. I had to go out and buy it..”

He took a 45 record out of a plastic Korvette’s bag. “Just listen to this,” Uncle Phil said.

He got up and put the record on the turntable. He put the record on really low. It started out with guitars that sounded like the country music my father listened to, but then a deep, sad voice began singing words that were nothing like any country music I’d ever heard:

Yesterday when I was young 
The taste of love was sweet as rain upon my tongue
I teased at life as if it were a foolish game
The way the evening breeze may tease a candle flame….

As I sat on the couch listening, I watched Uncle Phil. He was still standing at the record player, but he had his ear dipped near the speaker, and kept getting closer and closer to it as the song went on. It was like he wanted to crawl inside the speaker.

“Isn’t that great?” he asked, when it ended.

“It’s really good,” I said.

He nodded. “Let’s listen again.”

He started the record again. Again, he listened with fierce concentration. At the end, he shook his head, then looked up at me as if waking up from a dream. “You don’t want to be in here with me,” he said. “You can go. It’s okay.”

As I walked away, I heard him cueing up the record again.

In the kitchen, there was light, and Steve was telling another story. Aunt Jane was laughing, and Linda, and Tina the next door neighbor, and my mother was laughing, which wasn’t something she did very much. Steve paused in his story long enough to ask me, “Meet anyone while you were doing your business?” which made everyone laugh even harder, and then he picked right up from where he’d left off.

I sat down in my seat. I was relieved to be back here, glad to be away from Uncle Phil and that dark living room. This was where I belonged.

But that song Uncle Phil  had played for me: how to explain much better it sounded to me than Bobby Sherman, and how much I wanted to hear it again?