Eating My Feelings (7 page)

“Come on,” Jeremy said. “I promise you’ll have fun.”

“As if!”

“As if what?”

“Never mind,” I said. I hadn’t eaten in about two days and I was starving. “Can we eat?”

“Yes, it’s time for breakfast,” Jeremy said. “Change your clothes and let’s go. If you want to take a shower, you can walk down the path to the showers.” I certainly needed something. Mosquitoes had violated my body while I slept, and I was itching everywhere.

“Showers? As in the plural of a shower?”

“Yes,” he replied, “everyone showers together.”

Gay.

“I don’t think I have the strength to shower right now, because I am so incredibly hungry, so let’s eat.” There was no way I was going to shower with a bunch of guys. What would happen if I got excited? Then all the boys would know I was a homo. However, none of the other boys rolled into camp with a bottle of
Melrose Place
cologne, which would have clearly tipped anyone off, but that was safely put away, with my
Soap Opera Digest
in the bottom of my suitcase. I was going to have to change my ways in order to fit in. I felt like Demi Moore in
G.I. Jane
. She had to change her ways to fit in with the boys in the army. However, shaving my head was out of the question.

Jeremy took me down to the cafeteria and we ate a healthy breakfast of soggy oatmeal and bananas. Day one and I hated it already. But Jeremy was lovely. He was super cute and super fit. He was an “after,” meaning he had already lost weight and came back because he actually liked it and wanted to keep the weight off. When he was telling me all of this I felt as if he was speaking Mandarin, because everything he said made absolutely no sense to me whatsoever. But he was a funny kid. He would try to tell jokes and fuck up the ending, so every joke
ended with: “Oh, no, what I meant to say was … and that’s why that joke is supposed to be funny.”

“Jeremy, honey,” I said, as if I were Joan Collins on
Dynasty
, though I would have been smoking a candy cigarette instead of a real one, “a joke isn’t funny if you say ‘and that’s why the joke is supposed to be funny.’ It’s just supposed to be funny. And that wasn’t.” They never were, but Jeremy gave me the lay of the land and showed me where everything was.

That afternoon was water sports afternoon where everyone would team up with a buddy and do an activity on the lake. I had asked if there was a swimming pool to lounge around by and possibly get some sun, but was informed there was no pool, just a crib, a roped-off section, in a dirty lake to swim in. In my usual fashion of being a lazy fat-ass, I had already befriended the nurse, who was the only woman on the campus, and told her my story. Her name was Leslie and we bonded over a mutual love of
One Life to Live
. She had a TV in her nurse’s office, so I figured I would be seeing a lot of her that summer. Having read
Soap Opera Digest
earlier in the week, I knew Carlo Hesser was strolling back into Llanview that Friday, so I had to plan some sort of ailment to take place around two in the afternoon, one central time, later that week. But that day, with storm clouds looming, I thought about faking an illness to get out of doing any sort of physical activity. It was past three in the afternoon, enough time to catch the tail end of
General Hospital
if I left then, but I figured it may be best to stick this one out and save the dramatics of faking an ailment for a more important time, such as having to run track or something ridiculous like that. Jeremy suggested that we get into a canoe and row around the lake. I had never been in a canoe before, but he assured me he would spearhead the operation.

We both got into the canoe but the water was looking a bit choppy. We swayed back and forth as we entered and sat on the wooden slabs inside. God love Jeremy for knowing what the hell was going on, because immediately I almost tipped us over. I wasn’t the best of swimmers because when I was in the water I looked more like a piece of muffin floating in a cup of coffee. I would just float around and embrace my fatness. This canoe was a foreign object to me and the two of us did not get along. How had I come to this? All I wanted to do that summer was grow bangs and lovingly sing “Something’s Coming” to a white girl pretending to be Puerto Rican. What the hell happened?

As we began canoeing around the lake, a man in a speedboat approached us. He had a few kids in his boat with him and at first I thought he might be taking everyone to the MTV beach house.

“HEY, JEREMY!” the man yelled.

“GLENN!” Jeremy yelled back at the camp counselor.

“Who the hell is that?” I asked. Glenn looked like a douche bag. He was wearing sunglasses, when he clearly needed nothing to block his eyes from the absent sun. He was shirtless, had a beard that was reminiscent of something a rapist would sport, and was just all-around gross looking. He really looked like one of those guys who just randomly showed up at girls’ high-school basketball games for no apparent reason.

“CIRCLE AROUND US AND MAKE OUR CANOE ROCK!” Jeremy yelled.

“Ummm … how about not?” I asked.

“Come on, Mark, it’ll be fun. Like we’re in a whirlpool.”

“I am fine just gliding around the lake, thank you very much.”

But Jeremy didn’t listen and Glenn began circling around our canoe with the intent to kill. Some people should never be allowed in the same room as a child, let alone counsel them at a summer camp. Glenn was one of those people. He continued to circle our canoe and we began swaying back and forth.

“Seriously, he needs to stop,” I told Jeremy.

“We’ll be fine,” Jeremy said as our canoe tipped over.

This was the second time in two years that my life flashed before my eyes. Two near-death experiences in less than twenty-four months at the hands of my diabolical nemesis: Stacey. I started blaming her for everything, even when she wasn’t there. Underwater, I quickly began to contemplate whether or not to fight. Could I possibly go through another month of agonizing torture or should I just call it a day and die now? Nothing fun was going to happen this summer and I had had a pretty good run, so why not just throw in the towel? I had managed to see every episode of
Melrose Place
, so why fight it?

“MARK!” I heard Jeremy yell from above.

How was he already back in the canoe?
I wondered.

I floated to the top and began bobbing up and down in the water.

“Wasn’t that fun?” Jeremy asked.

“NO!” I yelled. “Eating all day and watching reruns of
Knots Landing
is fun. This is torture.”

“CLIMB BACK INTO THE CANOE,” Jeremy yelled.

Glenn, who was sitting in the speedboat next to us, decided to chime in: “Use your upper-body strength to hoist yourself back into the canoe.”

“Upper-body strength? What upper-body strength?”

I put both of my hands onto the ledge of the canoe and
tried to hoist myself up and back into it. Unfortunately, the only workout my arms had gotten in my twelve years on earth was from putting chip to mouth, and that doesn’t really build one’s biceps.

“Come on, Mark, you can do it,” Glenn said.

“Shut the fuck up,” I said under my breath.

I pulled up with my arms and could not manage to maneuver myself back into the canoe. After about ten tries, it took Glenn and three of the kids on the speedboat to get me back into the canoe. I didn’t know if these kids were actually going to the MTV beach house, but thank God they were there and well-toned or I would have been a goner.

Jeremy and I rowed back to shore and I immediately made a beeline to my only ally for miles.

“LESLIE!” I yelled as I flung open the doors to the nurse’s office.

“Mark, what’s the matter?” she said as I ran to her.

“My canoe tipped over. That asshole Glenn did it. I think I have a concussion and will most certainly need to go home.”

“Let me take a look at you,” Leslie said as she inspected my head. I glanced over at the TV to possibly catch the last ten minutes of
General Hospital
, but much to my displeasure,
Oprah
had already started. “You look okay to me.”

“DAMN IT!” I yelled. “I hate this fucking place! Why am I here and not at home baking cupcakes and watching old movies? This summer is going to blow.”

“Maybe you need to change your attitude a little bit,” Leslie said.

“Change my attitude? Maybe these people need to go fuck themselves. And that Carl is the worst of them all.”

“You’re telling me,” Leslie said. I wondered what beef she had with the camp owner, whom everyone else seemed to love.

“Whatever do you mean?” I innocently asked Leslie.

“Well, he just will not seem to ever leave that skanky wife of his.”

“Why would you want him to do that?” Could I possibly add extortion to my list of crimes? If Leslie spilled some serious dirt about Carl, I could blackmail his ass into letting me leave camp early. Erica Kane would have been so proud. This is why I watched soap operas in lieu of cartoons as a child—life lessons learned.

“Well,” Leslie said, as if she were letting me in on some deep dark secret, “do you remember on
One Life to Live
when Viki decided that she didn’t want to be with Clint anymore, so she could begin seeing Sloane?”

“Listen, lady, I have been around the block a time or two myself,” I told her. “You’re having an affair with Carl, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” she replied, “but please keep it between the two of us.”

“Of course,” I said with a grin as big as a Cheshire cat’s. “One question.”

“Yes.”

“You are so much cuter than he is, so why do you even care?”

“Because, Mark,” she replied. I began wondering why anyone over the age of eighteen even bothered telling me anything. I was such a troublemaker. She continued, “When you meet the one, you just know.”

“What about his wife?” I asked.

“That whore,” she laughed. “No competition for me whatsoever.”
I believed her. She was pretty smoking and about thirty years younger than what I imagined Carl’s wife to be.

“Good luck with that,” I said as I walked out of the nurse’s office stealing a few Band-Aids on my way out.

As I walked back to my cabin, I decided to concoct a diabolic plan to escape from camp by ruining several lives, while I came out of the entire situation relatively unscathed. I would be here for another two or three days, tops, and then off I would go, back to D.C. However, when I returned to my cabin, things went from bad to worse. I flung the screen door open and noticed that there were a few new guests at the camp. I figured that Jeremy and I were not going to be alone in our spacious cabin all summer, but did not think that we would be rooming with the Model UN.

“¡Hola!”
kid number one said.

“Uh, hey,” I said.

“Mark, come meet our new roommates,” Jeremy said as he gestured the four new recruits to Camp Hell toward me. “This is Anthony,” he said as I shook Anthony’s hand. “And this is Anthony,” Jeremy said as he gestured toward the other Italian-looking kid.

“So wait, you’re both named Anthony?” I asked.

“Fuck you,” Anthony 1 said.

“Fuck you,” Anthony 2 said.

They both looked at me like I had just sharted in front of them.

“They don’t speak English. They’re Italian, and only seem to know English curse words for some reason,” Jeremy explained.

“VA FANGOOL!” I yelled. The Italians looked at me as if I had just killed their parents. “Well, seems as though you can dish it out, but you can’t take it.”

Jeremy gestured to two more foreign kids.

“This is Giovanni,” Jeremy said as I shook Giovanni’s hand. “And this is Juan,” he said as I shook Juan’s hand.

“Do any of them speak any English?” I asked.

“I don’t think so,” Jeremy replied.

“What the hell are they doing here?” Anthony squared and Giovanni seemed to be from Italy, but I wasn’t really sure where Juan was from. Somewhere in Poor, I imagined.

“Apparently, it’s cheaper for them to go to camp in America or something. I think it’s nice. Maybe we can learn about another culture while we are here.”

“Are you like a real person, Jeremy?” I asked. “You are way too happy. You must be hiding some sort of deep dark secret or something. I have never met anyone as happy as you are.”

“I don’t know. I just like people I guess,” he replied.

“Well, that makes one of us,” I said. Suddenly things went from worst to agonizingly torturous when Glenn waltzed into our bunk.

“HEY CAMPERS,” Glenn yelled.

“GLENN!” all of the foreigners yelled. They couldn’t say hello in English, but they apparently knew exactly who Glenn was. Curious. “So listen, guys, Jack was supposed to be the counselor for this bunk, but he was arrested for sleeping with underage girls or something, so looks like you’re stuck with me.”

“JESUS CHRIST!” I yelled. Everyone looked at me.

“Something the matter, little man?” Glenn asked.

“I have to see Carl,” I said as I breezed out the door. I made a beeline for the head cottage to take down Carl, ruin his marriage, and get the hell out of Dodge as quickly as possible.

I sashayed across camp as fast as my cookie-loving ass
could go. I hustled through the woods, and on the other end I saw a light that guided me toward Carl’s cottage. I could tell that he was home and walked up the stairs to his cottage and knocked on the door.

“Oh, hello, young man,” Carl said as he opened the door.

“I’m coming in,” I said. I barged in and took a seat on one of the big sofas he had. Compared to the shit shacks the rest of us were staying in, Carl’s cottage looked like the Taj Mahal.

“Can I help you with something?” Carl asked.

“Shut the door,” I said. If there was one thing I had learned from Erica Kane, it was to make sure that no one else was around while you were hatching an extortion plot. If someone happens to overhear, then they can blackmail you and the cycle continues.

“Is something wrong?” Carl asked as he shut the door and came to sit on the sofa adjacent to me.

“I was just speaking to Leslie,” I said as cool as a cucumber, “and found out something relatively shocking.” I glanced at the picture of his wife and children on the table by his sofa. What a loving family they had. Certainly he would not want to give that up for a summer fling with the camp nurse.