SHORT STORY: Camp Charleston - Part II (of IV)

continued from Part I

B.D. (Before Daniel)
After breakfast the next day, Randy Sue led us out to the big field to start CPI training. CPI: Crisis Prevention and Intervention – this was how you got legally certified to physically restrain unruly kids in Canada. It was pretty anti-climatic. I was hoping to learn some defense moves, holds, kick-ass stuff. We were still on prevention. Randy Sue handed out whistle on strings we were to wear as necklaces “at all times”.

“Even in bed?” Manny asked.

“C’mon guys.”

She said they were only to be used in emergencies.

The morning lesson was about personal space, how to properly approach a child when they’re ‘raging’: kicking, punching, out of control violent – a danger to self and others. Randy Sue put us in two facing lines, ten feet apart, and told us to stand across from someone of similar height. She said she’d go first to show us how it was done. She chose me as her volunteer not, I’m sure, because of my height (I’m 6”1), but because we were an odd numbered group and I’d not found a partner.

“I’ll just make Ben crouch.”

Manny, of the pony tail and biceps, found this hilarious.

Randy Sue started slowly walking towards me. My job was to say ‘stop’ when I felt her entering my personal space. I stopped her a solid foot and a half from me.

“You see, ” Randy Sue boomed in her rather affected 'assistant camp director' voice. “Through this exercise we learn how getting right up into a child’s face to yell “CALM DOWN, LITTLE BILLY!” might not be the most effective method.”

Of course some people, Randy Sue herself for instance, have no personal space. When everyone began the exercise and I slow walked towards Randy Sue, she never said stop so that we literally ended up nose-to-nose. She seemed comfortable, smiling, Eskimo kissing me like that. And really, that’s all you need to know. If a girl, in a personal space exercise, if she feels comfortable rubbing noses with you ...

The night after that, after another not overly taxing day of training, another day that didn't remotely suitably prepare us newbies for the stress ahead, Randy Sue and I hung out in her room, listening to CDs supposedly. There was, to use an oudated but really rather wonderful term, some 'heavy petting.' It was after midnight when lying with her in her bed, our clothes still on (though someone’s shirt - I’m not saying whose - was un-tucked) I pulled out a cigarette, put it in my mouth and pretended to strike a match.

“Ben!”

I said I was kidding.

“Seriously, Ben, we have to go off camp property.”

I laugh-sighed; said I knew.

We walked out to the pebbly camp road. Randy Sue told me that once camp started she would only smoke after the kids had gone to bed. I called her square. It was a joke. She laughed a little, but she didn’t like it because it was true, and was a truth she hadn’t confronted in herself. We went up over the lip of the hill, out the wedged wide-open wood camp gate and down to where the large empty Heinz tin (for butts) sat, off to the side of the road, the dark forest behind. No one was out there and because it was doubtful (but still somehow possible-exciting) that a car would be coming to camp at this late hour, I dared the red-headed camp’s assistant director into giving me a blowjob on the road. It really was supposed to end at that. But somehow I didn’t feel like I could just take the blowjob and run. I was having fun. I never wanted to break anyone’s heart. I thought we could be together for a few days. I could handle that. But really I needed it to be open. Other options, you know. Saturday. Ashley the lifeguard is coming day.

Ashley the Lifeguard is Coming Day
We were in a big circle, most of us cross-legged, on the big field our last afternoon of CPI training when someone mentioned Ashley’s arrival. We broke with a half hour to spare before dinner. It wasn’t hard to ditch Randy Sue. She always had things to do; couldn't not.

I found Ashley the lifeguard in the barn playing basketball, solo. Those two facts alone, that she played basketball and that she could be alone. Already it was love. She was bent low, back and forth dribbling the ball hand-to-hand in silky soccer shorts that showed long, not thin, tanned legs. Thick, strong thighs. She was blonde, but dirty blonde, and her hair was tied severely back in a short ponytail. She went “fuck!” when she missed the shot. Then noticed me.

“Hey.”

Even that, the way she said hey. So nonchalant. Like, either way.

I pretended I was there, in the barn, for something. Went straight-determined for a wobbly wooden shelving unit behind the net she was shooting at. Scrobbled through a shelf of rubber balls and plastic orange hockey pucks. I shook my head (in case I was being watched in the performance of not finding what I’d not really been looking for), turned and quickly left the barn.

At dinner she was sat at the same table as me and Randy Sue; I already hated it that Randy Sue had to sit with me every chance she got. Ashley’s shortish dirty-blonde hair was down now, slicked back, post-shower still wet. It didn't reach her shoulders. “Have you guys been introduced?” Randy Sue asked. I said we had, said hi again (without much in it) then turned back to Randy Sue. Anywhere else I would have approached it all wrong. Turning to Ashley, staying on Ashley too much, too excited, too bright-light overbearing. The wetness of her hair at dinner and the bronze of her skin, these things alone would have been enough for me to package up my energy and send it to this girl direct and hyper express so hard as to knock her over and smother any chance of a fire as I so usually did with girls I found too hot to handle. But somehow up there in the clean Ontario air I was able to wait.

Or maybe it had something to do with Randy Sue, who everyone was already referring to as my girlfriend.

A few nights or about sixty T-shirt removals into first session I caught Ashley alone up at the road where smokers smoked. Caught. As if I’d not been planning it, timing, it, calculating like a thug about to rob the only bank, the only place worth robbing (girl with calculating for) in town (camp). Ashley, I now well knew, ate like a teenage boy, fast and messy. I raced through my meal because too soon she’d be done and gone over the lip of the road. The dirty smoker. Body of a swimmer, soul of a sinner. How could I not love this girl?

When I got up from the table with my now very familiar green bandana tied tight over my head, Randy Sue, sitting with a younger group of kids a few tables down, looked up, her curly red hair going boingy-boingy from just the minor movement of a head raise. I put two smoking fingers to my lips. Head-gestured, like, ‘You wanna come’?’ She gave me a sad puppy for a look, like I wish. As if I hadn’t remembered her no smoking by day rule. I gave an oh shame look and a wink, and again told Forester that I would be back and that Allen, the counsellor sitting on Forester's other side, "He's promised to hang out with you till I come back. Ok?" I waited for the nod. It was a while in coming, but it came.

I caught up with Ashley as she was walking out through the camp gate. They were just baggy, navy Roots sweat pants, but she walked so straight-backed athletic. Also, you could see her nipples through her shirt.

“Heya, Benji-boy. How goes it?” She was squinting from the fading but still strong summer sun. It was just going seven and already the mosquitoes were buzz constant at our ears.

I sighed. “Tough, Moncton, tough.” Moncton, the town she was from.

“Yeah?” She bent to scratch a bite on her ankle. “Just wait till LD starts, city-boy.”

“You know how many times I took my shirt off today?”

Ashley laughed. This was her fourth summer. “You having fun with Forester?”

“I’m sorry, but I thought I was supposed to be getting ‘eased in’,” I said, adding the bend-bend fingers for quotation marks before slapping the back of my neck at that first itch that feels like it’s the mosquito – the fucker – biting you, but never is (you don’t feel that), just the too-late after-effect.

“It’s cause he doesn’t have major behavioural issues.”

“No, he’d just tear my scalp off if I didn’t wear a bandana all day.”

“Ohhhh!” Ashley said, with mock sympathy. “You have to wear a bandana all day.”

“I guess I am lucky. He is a sweet kid otherwise”

“You’re so lucky. Forester’s a legend! Love that kid!”

“We got him up on water skis for the first time yesterday.”

“You serious?” Now she was smiling.

“You’re good with him,” she said, a quiet thing. She finally wasn’t joking for a second.

“Really?”

“Oh, get over it,” she said, rolling her eyes.

She said, “You know why Forester’s an angel?”

“No.”

“Two words: Marvin and Diane. The formula is that simple. Good parents – good kids; bad parents – hell in a hand basket.”

“You think?”

“Yeah. Always. Pretty much.”

“Always pretty much, maybe, Moncton?”

“Shut up.” She said, but then smiled a sinister, only one side of her mouth lifting up for the supposed, grin. “Just wait till they give you someone tough.”

“Oh yeah?” I said, not hearing anything but the energy between us. We were standing close as we talked so I kept talking, thinking this was the glue that was keeping me so inside her personal space – amen. I teased her again and she slugged me in the arm, hard. I hit her back, play-hard. I wanted the touching to continue but a threesome of counselors were coming down the hill.

I worked it so Ashley and I smoked that first after dinner cigarette every night from then on. And there was always a reason to give her a little body check or to make her shove me. Like kids in a playground. That kind of energy. During the day too I’d find reasons to go down to the lake to see her standing on the dock in her white full-piece, surveying the water, so straight-backed tough, hand on hips, sunglasses serious. Randy Sue was still my supposed girlfriend (though I thought I was being less unfaithful by not using the word) and sweet as she was, maybe too sweet as she was, she wasn’t exciting me at all anymore. Fuckface that I was, I’d taken to trying to fool around with her without the kissing part. Or skipping fooling around with her altogether.

I should explain that I didn’t sleep in the kid’s house, one of the only counselors who didn't. It was a matter of space and the dumb luck of having been the last counselor at camp. My room was in a separate house, the one for the specialty staff, meaning Randy Sue’s room was four rooms down the hall from mine, meaning that when I left Randy Sue's room I walked past Ashley's door, two rooms from mine. Fantasies abounded at Camp Charleston, let me tell you, and we were only two weeks in.

I realized I was really gonna miss Forester. Ashley was right. He was a sweet, sweet guy. Autistic boys don't suffer from ego and attitude too much. The handsome kid had taught me patience, and dexterity - I was getting ninja-quick at dodging those lightning limbs of his. I was also learning how to communicate without words, non-verbally, as Forester did. Yeah, I would miss him. It was after our last day together, out on the road, by the Heinz tin of butts, that I told Ashley that I loved her. I’m kidding. She’d have laughed her ass off at that. No, I just went up and poked her in her side. She liked to think she was tough but she was hyper-ticklish. She leapt up. “Fucker!”

I told her I had Daniel Duchene for LD session.

“Oh shit! You serious? You got Daniel?”

“Is he that bad?”

Ashley cringed. “Put it this way, we called him ‘The Little Terror’ last summer.”

“Great,” I said, swatting away a bee that kept circling round my head.

Daniel didn’t just have ADD he had ADHD (the H stands for Hyperactive) and not just ADHD but Tourette’s syndrome on top of that. By now I’d learned that unless heavily medicated, a person with Tourette’s has “tics” – physical and sometimes also verbal. The physical tics are commonly facial movements, things like overly repeated eye blinking, coughing, throat clearing or sniffing. The verbal tics, if there are any, come out as random outbursts and are often curse words. But this isn’t why Daniel was famously challenging. Plenty Charleston campers had a brutal mix of neurological disorders. Daniel was a handful because he was super-smart and like so many too smart kids, he cured his boredom by messing with authority.

Then I found out why this summer would be even harder.

Next: Camp Charleston Part III (D Day)

Currently reading

Michael Chabon's "The Mysteries of Pittsburgh"
Barak Obama's "The Audacity of Hope" (kind of stopped reading it, actually)
Van Gogh's "The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh"

Anyone got any book suggestions? Always looking for the next tome worth shlepping to the old island.

[Part II of "Camp Charleston" coming to a website near you Thursday]

Rather a Good Story Than a Blog

So I'm a writer, right? But the funny thing is I haven't really said much about that here. Why not, pray tell? I think this eight year-old conversation I had in a coffee shop with an old friend who was studying to become a dentist at the time, will clarify things a tad:

Me: I feel uncomfortable calling myself a writer.
Friend: Why?
Me: Because I haven't published anything yet.
Friend: So maybe you're not a writer yet.
Me: But I'm writing, all the time. That seems unfair.
Friend: I don't think it's unfair. I'm not a dentist till I finish dental school. Maybe it's that you're still in "writing school".
Me: Ooh. I like that.

Turns out (eight years later) writing school's taken a little longer than I thought - turns out, writing school might just take a lifetime. Still, I think it's time I be a wee bit more open about what I'm doing and how and why. So starting this week I'm going to start posting my short stories, in parts, because the blogosphere is a fickle lady. She don't like reams of paper. Edible chunks, rather. Digestible tidbits, if you will, as it were, your mother.

I tried posting stories before and didn't get much response. But I figure, this is what I do, and as a dear friend said to me the other night (what motivated me to do this), "I'd rather read a good story than a blog."

"More money is put into baldness drugs than malaria." - Bill Gates

The ex-CEO at Microsoft and the richest man in the world didn't go on to invent the Ipod; Bill Gates has been trying to solve world poverty, amongst other things, instead.

This week at TED (the annual Technology, Education and Design conference held in California) Gates spoke on:
1. Issues of solving malaria in the Third World; and
2. How to make teachers great

[I can't say I agree with all his ideas for improving education (the camera in the classroom idea is particularly scary, simplistic, etc), but Gates, ferocious Capitalist that he may be, isn't just out to make more money for himself. This gives me hope.]

This year's silly popularity contest that is the Oscars (that I will still definitely watch, dumb-dumb)

Film Critic David Denby writes in this week's New Yorker that the "nod" for best pic should have gone to "more deserving movies" such as "Rachel Getting Married," "Happy-Go-Lucky" (my pic for best film of the year), and "Wall-E," all of which were in my top ten.


He goes on to say that,
"The total of thirteen nominations for “Benjamin Button” has to be some sort of scandal. “Citizen Kane” received nine nominations, “The Godfather: Part II” eleven, and this movie ... is nowhere close to those two. In fact, of the five nominees for best picture—“Milk,” “Frost/Nixon,” “The Reader,” “Slumdog Millionaire,” and “Benjamin Button”—only “Milk,” ... has the aesthetic life and human vitality that warrant its nomination."

Here, here!

Desert Island List Update

RECAP of what's been taken to palm tree paradise to read while sipping whiskey by the fire by the sea

#1 Haruki Murakami's "Norwegian Wood"
#2 J.D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye"
#3 Arundathi Roy's "The God of Small Things"
#4 John Steinbeck's "East of Eden"

"Challengers" by The New Pornographers

[Much more for song than video (though I like the video some), I put this here as background while you peruse. Or, if you prefer, just watch the video and ignore the rest of the site. Cause really, how do I honestly know what you want? Why am I even getting involved in your web habits?]

Poor Roger

Rafael Nadal needed 4 hours and 23 minutes to defeat Roger Federer, 7-5, 3-6, 7-6 (3), 3-6, 6-2 on Sunday at the Australian Open. Nadal has won their last three Grand Slam matchups. -Associated Press