Eating My Feelings (8 page)

“Oh, and what was that?” he questioned.

“She told me that you two had a little something going on.”

“ARE YOU SERIOUS, YOUNG MAN?” he yelled.

“Yes.”

“GET OUT!” he screamed.

“Why? I am here to make a little bargain with you.” My first-ever extortion plot was going off better than I could ever have hoped. I had him right where I wanted him.

“I am not making any sort of deal with a twelve-year-old,” he said.

“I think you will want to, once you know what my offer is,” I replied.

“Offer? WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?” Carl yelled. “Were you raised by wolves?”

“No, I was raised by Susan Lucci and Heather Locklear. If you have a problem with that, you can take it up with them!”

“What do you want?” he asked.

“Okay. I promise not to tell your wife about your tryst with the nurse if you let me go home.”

“No deal.”

“What? You didn’t even think about it.”

“I did. But, what you didn’t think about was how you were going to get in touch with my wife. She runs the girls camp, across the lake in Vermont. The only way to get there is by boat, and judging from your little nautical adventure earlier today, I don’t think you will be up for making that trip.”

Son of a bitch.

“I can write her.”

“You don’t know the address.”

“I will find it.”

“Listen, you little asshole,” he said as he grabbed me by the collar, “you will tell no one about this. Do you hear me?”

“Excuse me,” I said as I backed away from him. “Are you manhandling me right now?”

“OF COURSE I AM!” he yelled. “You’re trying to blackmail me!”

“I want out, Carl. And I want out now,” I said.

“Well, sorry buddy boy. I am going to do everything in my power to make sure that you stay here for the duration of the summer and I will make your life a living hell.”

“Are you threatening me?” I asked.

“No, that’s a promise.”

“Fine. I will write my mother and tell her what’s going on. She’ll come and get me.”

“Assuming she gets your letters.”

“Tampering with other people’s mail is a federal offense,” I replied. It is. I saw Erica try to steal Brooke’s mail earlier that year on
All My Children
, so it must have been true.

“GET OUT!” he yelled. “I don’t want to see you for the rest of the summer!”

I stormed out of the cottage and it began to rain. Instead of getting out of camp, I had unleashed a hell that was going to terrorize me for the rest of the summer. My only ally, Leslie, was sure to never speak to me again, as I had outed her secret. To top it all off, I was rooming with four of the five original members of Menudo. I ran back to my bunk, picked up my pen and Winnie-the-Pooh stationery, and began writing my epitaph. Earlier that day I’d realized that my idiotic father and stepmother had given me the wrong address for people to send me mail. First they sent me to this awful place, and now they apparently did not want me to have any contact with the outside world. The following is a real letter that I wrote to my mother. Nothing has been altered from its original format; this is really how crazy (and kind of racist) I was at the age of twelve.

“HELP!” I wrote in big bubble letters on the first page of the letter.

“Mommy—look at this face.” I then drew a sad face with a really bad haircut and an arrow pointing to my hair. “My stupid bushy hair which the dumb Hair Cuttery woman gave me.”

I was such a scamp. I waited for a night messenger from the U.S. Postal Service to arrive on horseback to take my mail, but when he didn’t show, I dropped the letter into the mailbox, in hopes no one would steal it. I went to bed that night and had the most amazing dream that Lorenzo Lamas had spirited me
out of camp and back home. When I woke up the next morning to Jeremy’s face smiling and telling me to wake up, I knew it couldn’t have been true.

“Wake up!” Jeremy said.

“No! Go to hell,” I said.

“That’s no way to talk to your best camp buddy. Come on, let’s shower.”

“No. I am not showering with you.”

“You’ll start to stink,” Jeremy said.

“Well, the Italians don’t seem to mind, so what do I care? They really aren’t frequenting the showers from what I gather either.”

“Come on, Mark, you need to take a shower,” Jeremy said.

“Like hell I do,” I said as I got up, put on my shoes, and walked out the door. As I was walking down to the cafeteria, I glanced by the nurse’s office and saw Leslie, who was probably watching
The Price Is Right
, looking extremely melancholy. I hoped that I hadn’t gotten her in trouble with that asshole Carl, but then realized she would probably be better off without him. If need be, I would make it a point to pop by later in the day and tell her that she could do better than him and offer a shoulder for her to cry on. For the time being, I needed to get my ass down to the cafeteria and eat something. I was so hungry. Three days of healthy food was taking its toll on me and I was beginning to become weak and possibly anemic. Perhaps it had something to do with the lack of preservatives in my diet or the fact that the cookie food group was now completely lacking from my routine. Either way, I was starving and needed something to eat, and quick.

As I was hiking down the hill, my least favorite person at camp stopped me: Glenn. I am not exactly sure why I hated
him as much as I did, but the sight of him made me nauseous. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that he looked like a straight-up rapist. We were, however, stuck together for the duration of the summer and I was going to have to put up with his nonsense for the rest of the month.

“Where ya going, buddy?” Glenn said as he stopped me.

“I NEED TO EAT. NOW!” I yelled.

“No time for that,” Glenn said as he put his hands on my shoulders and physically turned me around and began pushing me back up the hill.

“Are you seriously touching me right now? God only knows where those hands have been,” I said. “Where are you taking me? I need to eat something. NOW!”

“Back up the hill,” Glenn said. “I got word from Carl this morning—you need to be with the other set of kids at camp.”

Oh, shit, they are sending me to be with the fatties
, I thought.

“Other kids?” I asked, as Glenn continued to push me back up the hill. “Stop touching me, I can walk up a hill on my own,” I added. I was, however, almost completely out of breath and had only walked about ten steps.

“Yes,” Glenn said. “Carl thinks it’s time for you to be with some of the more proportionally challenged kids at camp.”

“The fat kids?” I asked.

“Ummm … kind of, yeah.”

“DAMN HIM!” I yelled.

I knew it was too good to be true. Granted, I had only been at camp for a few days, and I knew it was only a matter of time before I would be carted away to spend time with the fatter kids at camp. I was, after all, there to lose weight, and until then the only physical exercise I had gotten was being lifted from the cold lake back into a canoe.

“What’s your problem with Carl?” Glenn asked as we walked up the hill.

“I hate him. I hate you. And I hate this camp,” I replied.

“Okay, understandable,” Glenn said.

“What? Aren’t you going to tell me that I need to buck up and be a part of the team?”

“No,” Glenn replied. “If you don’t like it, you don’t like it. But remember, it’s not forever, and maybe you can learn something here.”

“Ummm … okay,” I replied. That was the first decent thing that had come out of Glenn’s mouth in the short time I had known him. We walked up the hill and followed a path that led us behind the community showers (four days in and I still had no idea where they were), through a mess of trees and onto a large playing field. When we approached, all I saw was a bunch of fat-asses. Each was bigger than the next. I was not nearly as fat as these kids were. Was I?

“Okay, Mark,” Glenn said, “I have to go back down the hill. I am going to motorboat over to the girls’ camp and hopefully motorboat one of the counselors, ha-ha-ha.”

What an idiot. Glenn left me, and a waiflike man with glasses and a huge orange Jew-fro approached. At least one of my people was within view.

“I’m Kurt,” the redheaded Jew said.

“Mark,” I replied.

“I’ve heard a lot about you from Carl,” he said.

Apparently my extortion plot gone wrong was all over the front pages of the
Hidden Crest Tribune
that morning. I was wondering where my copy was and why I had not been interviewed for my side of the story.

“I’m sure,” I replied.

“Okay, Mark, we are doing some simple exercises so I can determine what work needs to be done and on whom. This will be quite grueling, but the results will be amazing and maybe you will begin to like yourself again.”

“I am pretty amazing just the way I am. Don’t you think?” I asked.

He sniffed around me, obviously wondering what intoxicating scent surrounded my body.

“It’s cologne. From
Melrose Place
,” I said. He looked confused, so I continued. “You know, the TV show.” He looked dumbfounded. “But you can buy it at CVS, I think. It’s not like from Melrose Place in L.A.”

“No cologne. It attracts bugs.”

“You’re telling me, I have like ten thousand mosquito bites.” Apparently I had acquired about three thousand more mosquito bites from when I wrote my mother the night before.

“So don’t wear it and you’ll be fine,” Kurt replied.

“I am trying this new thing,” I said.

“Oh, and what’s that?”

“I think the French do it.”

“What? Not shower and bathe in cologne?”

“Exactly,” I replied.

“Well, no more of that. When you are done here, you are going to be dying for a shower.”

Doubtful.

Kurt gestured me toward the other fat-asses who were bouncing up and down attempting to do jumping jacks. All I could think about was food. I was so fucking hungry. And thirsty. I would have loved a Coke and was wondering if there was a waitress anywhere nearby. I was also hoping there was one fierce fat girl around who I could talk shit with, but there
wasn’t one for miles. I watched all of the fatties jump up and down and suddenly realized that the second I joined them, I would be one of them. Perhaps it was time for me to start thinking about my health. I was fat, but was I as fat as the rest of them? As I began weighing in on the rest of the troupe in my head, Kurt began explaining what exactly was going on.

“So what we have here is a test of endurance,” Kurt said. I was watching and waiting for the fatties to drop like flies. “We are going to be testing your strength and we are also going to be testing how well you fare during a series of tests.”

“Can I please eat something first?” I asked.

“No.”

“But I am so hungry.”

“They’re all hungry too, but they aren’t complaining about it.”

I looked at the fat boys and all I could see was a look of sheer famishment. They were hungry too. They were just pussies and wouldn’t ask for food. But I would start a fat boys’ revolution and feed all of us. If Joan of Arc could do it, I certainly could find some hot dogs for these kids.

“Not so much hungry as starving.”

“All right, we’ll start jumping jacks and we will discuss food later.”

“I hate my life,” I said as I began jumping jacks with the rest of the fat kids. I did about four and suddenly a bead of sweat rolled down my face. It was something I had never experienced before. The only time I had sweat was while standing in front of an oven, and now here I was doing jumping jacks with twenty fat kids. Seeing the determination in the rest of kids made me think that I could do this after all. If I couldn’t beat them, I figured I might as well join them. My constant bitching was
clearly not going to get me out of actually working out. As I continued jumping jacks, I noticed that the ground was very soiled. The mud was sticking to my shoe and with each jack I jumped, the muddier my shoe became. I also couldn’t help but notice it smelled like my bathroom the day after I realized I had irritable bowel syndrome.

“Excuse me,” I said as I stopped jumping. “Uh, Kurt.”

“Yes,” he said.

“There is some serious mud going on up in here. What’s the deal?”

“Oh, that,” Kurt replied. “Well, we have been having some plumbing problems at the camp lately and the pipes have backed up onto this field. Not to worry though. Now get back to it.”

“So, wait a minute,” I said. “This field is filled with crap?”

Kurt said nothing but gave me a look that said, “It’s our little secret.”

My smart-ass anecdotes were getting me nowhere fast so I simply resumed jumping jacks. I thought about what Jesse and the rest of the kids at Stagedoor were doing. I was pretty certain that they were not playing in their own feces. Instead they were probably listening to Bernadette Peters’s new album and wishing I were there with them. I wished I were there. At that point, I wished I were anywhere other than where I was. A hooker hell in Tierra del Fuego sounded like Disney World compared to this place.