Spanking Shakespeare (3 page)

When I sit down at lunch I must look as smug as I feel because Katie asks me if I’ve just gotten laid.

“Not yet,” I say with a smile.

“What happened?” Neil asks.

I draw out the silence, savoring the moment. “Got a date with Celeste on Thursday.”

Neil nearly jumps out of his seat. “What happened?”

“Jesus,” Katie says, looking at him. “What the hell’s the matter with you?”

I tell them what happened, leaving out any moments of personal awkwardness and insecurity.

“Screw the movie,” Katie says when I’ve finished. “Just get her drunk.”

“Yeah, right,” I say. “Very romantic.”

“Take her to the new Showcase Cinemas,” Neil says. “They have the best bathrooms.”

Katie glares at him. “Could you be any more fucking pathetic?”

Neil blows her a kiss. “I love it when you talk dirty to me.”

Thursday comes, and I spend most of the day making a mental list of everything that could go wrong on our date. I have little hope that things will run completely smoothly, but I am determined to avoid any large-scale catastrophes. Once we make it to the movie, I figure I will be in the clear. I mean, how much can go wrong once the movie starts?

We have planned to see a new comedy, but when we meet after school, Celeste asks if I’d rather see a South American documentary playing at the art theater downtown. “It’s about the resurgence of Native American cultures in the Americas,” she says. “It’s supposed to be really good.”

It’s a documentary. It’s probably going to be one of the most insufferably boring movies I have ever seen. “Sounds good,” I say.

“Have you seen any of Alejandero’s other films?”

Alejandero? Is that his first name or his last name? “I don’t think so,” I say.

“He’s amazing. I saw a film he made about the domestic rituals of female Inuits that was so eye-opening.”

Female Inuits. Sounds fascinating. Can I have a large shovel or a long piece of rope?

We get on the bus, and I use the opportunity to change the subject.

“How’s your memoir coming along?” I ask.

Celeste takes a deep breath as if she’s about to deliver some pronouncement of great consequence. “It’s a challenge,” she says. “I mean, you read Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, and anything you write seems so childish and inept.” She looks at me expectantly.

Just get to the theater, I think. Dark room, no more talking. “I try to stay away from writers with long Russian names.”

Celeste laughs. She thinks I’m kidding.

When we get to the theater, Celeste refuses my offer to buy her ticket. “You can buy the popcorn,” she says. “I’ll go get seats.”

I don’t want popcorn. The butter makes me sick.

“And ask them to put extra butter on it,” she calls back to me.

The theater is half empty, but Celeste has managed to find us seats in the middle of a nearly full row, and I have to navigate my way over the legs and past the knees of several stone-faced senior citizens who sit rigidly, refusing to make room for me to pass. This is fun, I think as I stumble over a cane. I should go on dates more often.

The buttered popcorn and my frazzled nerves conspire against me, and just as the movie starts I develop intense stomach cramps. I look down the row. The old people have formed a blockade. On the screen there is tribal chanting, and a voiceover says, “After years of oppression, now the time has come for Montezuma’s revenge.”

“How long is this movie?” I whisper.

“About two and a half hours.”

I close my eyes. Wonderful. I’d say I’ve got about seven minutes before I start to crap all over this seat.

I actually hold out for twenty before I make a mad dash to the bathroom, where I release a cacophony of sounds that would leave even Neil wide-eyed with disbelief. I don’t want to go back. I don’t want to step over those surly senior citizens again and then realize that my stomach is still acting up. I don’t want to sit through two more hours of a movie without any plot, action, or nudity. But how long can I stay here before Celeste starts to worry and comes looking for me?

Fifteen minutes later I finally make my way back. “Are you okay?” she whispers as I slide into my seat.

I nod, though my shin is stinging from a well-placed kick from Mr. or Mrs. Medicare down the row.

Celeste remains focused on the screen. “I’ll tell you what you missed when it’s over.”

Better yet, just shoot me now.

When the movie ends, we stand outside the theater, and I tell Celeste how interesting I thought the film was, and she tells me that I should really try to rent the Inuit film, and I tell her that I will, though it’s more likely that I’ll chop off my left pinkie and sell it on eBay.

Celeste looks at her watch. “I should go. I’m meeting a friend for dinner.”

I nod, simultaneously relieved to be escaping our date without further damage and terrified that she is ditching me to go have dinner with some other guy. “Yeah, I need to get going myself. Are you taking the bus?”

“No, it’s close.” She squeezes my hand. “I’ll see you tomorrow in class.” Then she turns and walks off.

Bye. Feel free to discuss my bowel movements if you run out of things to talk about.

“Well, I’m glad to see the old pathetic Shakespeare is back,” Katie says to me at lunch the next day.

“I hate those bathrooms,” Neil says. “I told you to go to Showcase Cinemas.”

I push the food around my plate.

“Oh, cheer up,” Katie says. “She’s a stuck-up bitch anyway.”

“You think everyone is a stuck-up bitch,” I say.

“Not them,” she says, motioning to a table across the cafeteria where Rocco Mackey and a group of his friends are sliding their hot dogs in and out of their mouths.

“Gross,” Neil says. He wipes ketchup from his tray with his finger and licks it off.

Katie smiles. “
You’re
saying ‘gross’? You keep a journal of your bowel movements.”

Neil blushes and shoots me an angry look.

I shrug. “I didn’t know it was a secret. You seem so proud of it.”

“You have got to be the biggest freak I have ever met,” Katie says.

“What? What’s so weird about it?” Neil asks.

They begin going back and forth, and I let my eyes wander around the cafeteria. It’s all so familiar, the same groups sitting in the same places having the same conversations. At one table, I notice, Charlotte White is sitting alone, hunched over a notebook, writing furiously. She is completely absorbed, writing in an uninterrupted stream, pausing only long enough to turn the page before her pen races onward. With her free hand she sweeps some strands of hair out of her face like she is shooing away a fly. What could she be writing? What kind of dark, brooding voices are lurking inside her head?

“I’ll see you guys later,” I say, standing and pushing away from the table. “I’ve got some work to do.”

“Bye,” Neil says without looking up. He has pulled out his special notebook and is showing a speechless Katie his “daily log.”

I don’t know what I’m doing, but I find myself taking a circuitous route so I can walk past Charlotte’s table. As I get there, I pause, and in that moment she looks up at me and quickly closes her notebook.

I offer an embarrassed smile. “Are you working on your memoir?” I ask.

She shifts uncomfortably. “No. I mean, maybe. I mean, I don’t know if I’ll use any of this.”

I nod, because this makes perfect sense. “Who do you have for writing seminar?”

“Mr. Parke.” She puts her notebook in her bag.

“Really? Me too. What do you think of him?”

“I’m not sure,” she says. Then, after a moment, “He talks about his testicles a lot.”

I laugh. “Usually just the left one.” It occurs to me that this is probably the longest conversation I have ever had with Charlotte White. For all I know, it’s the longest conversation anyone has ever had with Charlotte White.

“I actually have to go,” she says. “I’m way behind on my memoir and the quarter ends next week.”

She gets up, and as she begins to walk away, I ask her what she was writing about.

She shakes her head. “It’s kind of personal.”

Of course it’s personal. Otherwise I wouldn’t be so curious. “Sorry,” I say.

“Maybe if I knew you better…”

I tell her I understand.

She starts to walk away and then turns back. “How’s your memoir going?”

“Pretty good. I’m up to the part where my parents sent me away to a camp straight out of
Lord of the Flies.
”

She smiles and walks off.

Mr. Parke says memoir is not just about the events in our lives, but also what those events reveal about who we are. He says that every story we tell should have an under-story, and everything we write should serve to illuminate the themes in our lives. When I started on this chapter of my memoir, he asked me to think about what it was really about. Is it my parents’ inexplicably poor judgment? Is it my unexpected and ultimately humiliating sexual awakening? Is it my earliest memories of my own insignificance?

I was six years old when my parents first sent me to camp, and the themes of my life were beginning to come into sharper focus.

THE TIME MY PARENTS SENT ME TO A CAMP STRAIGHT OUT OF
LORD OF THE FLIES

I have no idea how my parents selected Camp Greenwood for my inaugural camp experience, but it is hard to imagine they had any prior knowledge of the workings of that horrible place.

At Camp Greenwood everyone had a military rank, and, predictably enough, distinctions were based on age. First graders were privates, second graders corporals, third graders sergeants, and so on up the ladder to eighth-grade generals. Although not officially stated in camp literature, it was understood that the higher your rank, the more power you had, and so life was not good for those of us at the bottom of the to tempole.

Every afternoon the counselors would gather the whole camp together to gamble. The way it worked was this: the counselors would divide themselves into two teams and compete against each other in some sport. The campers had to bet on which team would win. We would signal our choices by sitting in one of the two designated spectator areas. If we were lucky enough to choose the winning team, we would form a long line, by rank, and receive candy. If we were on the losing side, we would be summarily dismissed to get ready for the next activity. The biggest problem with the system—aside from the fact that the counselors, not the kids, were playing; aside from the fact that some kids were getting candy and others were getting nothing; aside from the fact that kids were betting on adults—was the fact that no matter who won or who lost, the older kids always ended up with the candy anyway. It was called the tribute system, and it ensured that high-ranking officials on the losing side would not feel resentment toward low-ranking officials on the winning side and end up inflicting some form of corporal punishment.

The bathrooms, I quickly learned, were places to avoid at all costs. Older boys routinely peed in the sinks, overstuffed the toilets, and drew disturbing pictures on the walls. On one occasion, before I understood how things worked at Camp Greenwood, I sat down in a stall only to be plunged into pitch-darkness as a group of boys turned off the lights and ran away laughing. Too frightened to move, too frightened to scream, I sat there for what seemed like an eternity until my counselor realized I was missing and came looking for me. “Got caught with your pants down,” he said, laughing. “You’ll learn.”

And I did learn. I learned that the lake and the pool were the best places in the camp to urinate, and I came to savor the moment each day when I could just let myself go and feel the warmth of my urine spread around me. I never thought about the fact that many of my fellow campers were probably doing the same thing, but it would explain why the counselors never went in the water themselves and why they often referred to the pool as the toilet bowl.

It was in the camp swimming pool that I made a truly remarkable discovery. I was standing in the water with my stomach pressed up against the side when I began to feel a tingling sensation. I adjusted myself a little and the feeling became more intense. Ten more minutes of experimentation, and I hit on something that made me gasp and push away from the wall.

So began my first love affair, and as the summer wound down, all the indignities and injustices of camp life faded away, and I lived each day in feverish anticipation of my time in the pool.

I was too young to be self-conscious, and I was too enraptured to be discreet. One day I actually yelped in pleasure, and a group of older boys stopped what they were doing. “Look,” one yelled, “he’s humping the wall!”

Most of the kids in the pool were too young to be interested, but this group surrounded me and began to cheer me on.

“Do it again,” one of them said.

“Yeah, show us how you hump the wall.”

And all of them began to thrust their hips back and forth and make moaning sounds.

It felt weird and scary being surrounded by all these older boys, and I looked around for someone to rescue me.

“You know what would make it feel even better?” one of the boys said, and before I knew what was happening, two of them were holding my arms while a third pulled off my bathing suit.

“Stop!” I screamed, kicking and writhing and contorting my six-year-old body in an effort to get free.

“Look at how tiny it is,” one of the boys said. “I dare anyone to touch it.”

And then a lifeguard was there, saying to leave the kid alone and giving me back my bathing suit and telling me to calm down and saying it was all just in fun. He took me out of the pool and gave me some candy, and when I had stopped crying, he told me to go back in the water and this time to make sure that I kept my bathing suit on. But the pool would never be the same. I spent the final few days of camp staring longingly at my spot on the wall and wondering whether I would ever find such happiness again.

Toward the end of the summer there was talk that the camp was facing a lawsuit, and my parents started asking me a lot of questions about our day-to-day activities. I did not understand exactly what it was all about, but I gathered it had something to do with a popular activity the counselors had invented for the younger campers called the Coma Game.

Earlier in the summer, my counselor explained to us what it meant to be in a coma—no moving, no sound, basically being dead. What we had to do was to imitate someone in a coma, and the person who could do the best imitation for the longest amount of time would be the winner. Usually while we played, our counselor would wander off with the warning that he was watching us from a secret hiding place. If he was in a playful mood, he might come around and make funny noises, and we would have to struggle against laughter because people in comas never laughed.

The problem came when Sammy Levy’s grandfather went into an actual coma. Apparently Sammy had started making farting noises when he visited his grandfather in the hospital, and then asked his mother if Grandpa could come with him to camp to show everybody how good he was at the Coma Game.

My parents seemed more amused than upset by the things I told them, and although they never sent me back to Camp Greenwood, the Coma Game became a staple in our household until I was old enough to realize how sick and twisted grown-ups really are.