Sunday

 It’s too hot for this, I know it’s too hot, but I’m hunched in a ball anyway, desperately hoping that no part of me can be seen. If I’m whimpering, I hope I’m quiet about it, but the truth is I’ve never been good at subtly. 

Yesterday at the junior diamond, a little kid with shaggy brown hair and green eyes got himself smacked in the face, a result of his inability to control his mouth and my aforementioned lack of couthness. He was on my team, and we were up 5-1 in the bottom of the 8th. Everything looked like it was cool, but he kept coming at me, saying little things, being a little shithead. 

“Hey, you like the stuff they serve on Fridays?” he asked me for the thousandth time, knowing I’d been trained to ignore his stupidity.

His (much older) brother had gone up the Camper ranks and worked for some years as a counselor and staff member, head of archery or maybe it was swimming. A cheer had even been made for him when he finally got a job as a banker at Lehman to start of course AFTER his last Brunah summer:

D-O-L-L-A-R-S

DOLLARS, DOLLARS

BANKER-SON!

Bankerson was, ironically I guess, the family name. Whenever he visited thereafter, sometimes just chilling on campus for a week at a time just being awesome and doing nothing, his cheer would erupt spontaneously.

Anyway, Bankerson's brother, the little shithead who, yes, was a Bankerson too, was the batter in the hole, not up next, but the one after that. He already had his bat, and instead of working his swing inside the ascribed circle, he advanced on me pretending that he wasn’t being menacing. 

“The cornbread and chicken are good, am I right?”  The boy was close then, swinging that bat and sneering at me like he was so damn clever. 

He looked surprised when I popped him, like the blood on his lip wasn’t his. But I guess he didn’t think his 19 year old counselor/coach would actually stoop to physical violence. And I guess he assumed that the metal bat in his hand would protect him, but clearly I didn’t give a fuck.

“You're done here,” he’d muttered, retreating to the batter’s circle. 

“Batters up!” cried the ump.

That night in the dark of the North Country Bar, I’d laughed with the guys, my best buds. 

“Yo,” I said as I sipped beer number five,  “Bankerson is such a bitch.” Everybody sniggered, even Big Bankerson, who was of course visiting that week. 

“How do we even have the same parents?” Big B said, prompting even more laughs.

Suddenly we were all swept up in a cheer:

PENNIES, QUARTERS, NICKELS, DIMES

BANKERSON’S SISTER SURE IS FINE!

It was an after hours cheer and I had a feeling of comradery that I could feel down to the piss I was about to unleash on the bushes that lined the seedy wooden shack establishment some 25 minutes from camp. I’m not even sure there IS a Bankerson sister but it really doesn’t matter.

“Hey,” Big B says some time later, after the din of his cheer had died down, “Let me grab you a drink.”

Never a man to refuse free libations, and given Bankerson’s nifty gig on Wallstreet, I acquiesced. He ordered two White Russians, his beverage of choice, and we stood in the dingy one room establishment, just two bros having a drink together.

“Hear about that thing last week?” he asked casually.

Everyone knew about the slaughter of John Ashcroft. How his finger and toe nails had been ripped off. How he’d been lashed with a three pronged whip that most animals would run from. How his face had been speared off so that his countenance resembled a rouge peeled grape. How he’d been castrated, right hand made to hold his bloody balls, left hand his mangled dick. 

“Terrible” he says, without waiting for me to say anything. Then he was with the other guys, chortling and being drunk… 

Well that was last night, but it feels like a year ago and damn: I gotta pee. I’m mad that this cabin is as far as they get from the toot, fifty-two stairs in the trees. I don’t think I can climb up because I’m realizing I really have to go, like really badly but I can’t even move from this fetal position under the sheet.

On Sundays like tonight, we aren’t allowed out. Dinner, chapelsing, and listening to the brass trio try to play more hymns while your cabin fights over stolen candy under the stars. Then, bedtime. 

Most of us counselors are pretty good, but you used to be able to do what you wanted. People were routinely "absent" from breakfast and Monday morning wasn’t an exception. Big Bankerson famously missed Monday breakfast AND lunch three weeks in a row.

 Now though there’s night-watch and I’m not about to get busted. I was hauled in last week for missing curfew, but they meant to talk to DeMarcus. I would never come in at 5am. I'm a junior at The University, one of the youngest ever. I’ve got a reputation to protect.

I wonder how the kids are knocked out. Percy is snoring big, like he didn’t guzzle orange pop an hour ago. Sam and Connor both talk in their sleep, but they aren’t saying much now. Still, even under the covers I know they’re in the land of counted sheep, both of them, just from the big funk emanating from their farts. Or maybe it's something else. 

My assistant had been focused on Chip but I think he should have had his attention on Vaughn. Both were snorting pixie sugar, but the latter is from Baltimore. 

I’ve never been to that city, Baltimore. I mean sure, I almost applied to the robotics program at Hopkins. Oh and to get to Vermont, I came through BWI once. But I’ve never been there–Never even been to Maryland. 

Well Camp loves Baltimore. Even when I was a kid there were always boys who came from there. This church or that one, or maybe a foundation.

 Vaughn is at Brunah because his uncle paid the full pricetag. He likes to say that he is not one of them, but he is good at basketball. And track. It’s like he can’t help it… 

The fuck was that? That slamming sound. Like someone’s trunk was being closed too hard or something. I should look. The right thing to do is look. But I can’t. I just can’t. Because I can’t stop thinking of John Ashcroft now.  

Of his skinned off face, and his mashed up back. Of his lolling tongue, and the flies that surely circled. Of his swinging body, all burnt up, like he hadn’t already experienced enough suffering. 

I feel the naggling feeling in the back of my brain. The bile in the pit of my stomach threatening to overwhelm my throat, my mouth. That deep understanding that Big and Little Bankerson seem to just get about me. About my condition. About my loneliness.

Terrified, I moan once more, hoping the darkness will hide my own darkness. I’m definitely going to pee myself tonight.

Camp Ghost: Part IV

Once upon a time, there was this dude named Grover A. Brunah, and he was a late 19th century pimp. OD bad. OG for camp founders across America.

 I got all this from the fact that no one I’ve ever known at Camp, since I was a kid even, ever knew what the “A” in Grover “A” Brunah stood for.  I guess it’s just a placeholder for something too glorious to remember, the added syllable instrumental to conveying just how big a deal he is. Like the “W” in George W. Bush. 

Actually, there’s a picture of him hanging just inside the door of this climate controlled space, an impressive daguerreotype that was probably ostentatiously expensive in its day. 

“He was brolic,” Owusu observes appreciatively, the cavernous wells of his dimples apparent even though he’s not smiling. He’s in the blue tank and basketball shorts he always wears, now rubbing at a spot on his neck like a mosquito attacked him in the night.

“Man, just leave me alone,” I say, hoping he’ll just vanish into thin air.  

“Yea,” he agrees with a shrug, turning his attention from the old school image of Brunah on the wall, and landing the entire force of his presence on me. “Can’t do that bro. We’re counting on you.”

He looks scared again, like he did on main campus the other day when the Black dudes in orange, the ones in shackles, were out FOD walking across campus.  For an instant, his entire body sags, the luminous wick of his beauty flickering out of focus. 

“Counting on me?” I say, having the eerie sense of dejavu, like I’ve had this conversation before, and I’m not going to like the way it all ends. “Who’s counting on me? Who’s ‘we’?”

He smiles again, back to his cocky self. Vivacious and hearty and magnificent. 

“You ain’t mad is you?” he says, pointing at my swollen throat. It’s the same shit he said to me last night. “We was just tryna get your attention is all. And, hey look, it worked!” 

Before I can reply, the door to this little room swings open, and Bryant races in, breathless. 

“Dude, what are you doing in here?”

I turn to Owusu, but he just stares back with a blank look,  like there’s no way Bryant could be talking to him. 

“I was just—I was just—”  I begin, but the truth is, I’m not sure how I’d ended up here, in Camp Brunah’s official archives located in a room connected to Mess, down a tiny vestibule. Breakfast had ended and I'd just wandered over.

“Lemme guess: you’re studying for the bar exam?” laughs Bryant. 

His smile’s got that ironic glint, like the few words I’d contributed to the college conversation a few nights before in the beer circle jerk out at the school house, when I’d offered that maybe I wanted to study pre-law at the University, were a complete joke. 

“You gonna join us for lax or what?” 

I’d forgotten about the lacrosse tournament that was to commence ahead of the morning’s orientation sessions, “Infirmary and First Aid.”  I don’t have no stick skills, but as a defender, I’ve been to known to deck a mother fucker or two. 

But that shit ain’t what I’m contemplating right now. Honestly, I’m thinking real hard about not thinking about what Bryant was trying to say last night because Owusu, I mean Owen, I mean Owusu, he’s standing right here, full bodied and very real.

 I wanna be like “Hey Bryant, do you see Owen right now? I mean, can you see him?” But, I’m a fucking coward I guess. And anyway, I’m starting at the University in the fall, and I can’t be losing my shit.

“You ain’t losing your shit,” Shayla said the first time we tried to fuck, when I couldn’t get it up because I kept thinking about how big she said Jayvon is. I’d felt a huge weight on my chest, like a sumo wrestler just hanging out there about to squeeze out my organs, like a toddler squeezing the shit out of some strawberries already mashed up.

“You prolly just got anxiety,” she’d said, slipping into the clinical mind that was earning her all A’s at BMCC, majoring in psychology. “Or, maybe you’re just gay,” she’d added, rolling off the bed and pulling on the pair of panties I’d aggressively ripped off just a few moments ago. “Isn’t you’re Grandpa into guys?” 

“Dude, you still with us?” Bryant says now, somehow just a few inches from me. I can smell him, the musk of early summer sweat and some strangely floral man-scent he’s wearing, ancient, overpowering, and cheap as hell. 

“Fuck off” I growl, to my own surprise. 

Bryant throws up his hands like he respects my need for privacy or something, but his eyes go dead. For a second, he looks like he might make me prove just how committed I am to shutting him up. Then, he shrugs and looks around the room, directly at Owusu. The two lock eyes, Owen smiling big, and Bryant just shaking his head. Then, without a word, he’s out the door. 

“Woah,” I shout out a moment later, as Owusu turns on his heel and heads after Bryant, on his way out. 

“What’s going on man? Just tell me and stop being so cryptic.” 

“There’s rules, dude,” he says, an echo of that scared look crossing his face again. “Anyway, I gotta go check out the lax. Happy hunting bro.” 

With a swagger that is almost ridiculous, like some sort of exaggerated nigga-strut, he’s out the door.

With a sigh, I close my eyes and try to think about nothing. Then, I look up and see that Grover A. is looking right back at me.  Well, the picture of him is. 

He was a tall man, and yea, he looks like he wasn’t missing no meals, his arms straining against what appears to be a linen shirt that fits just right. I didn’t know they made dudes like that back then, but there he is, with a mustache that fits the era, and a half smile that makes him look almost smug in his larger than life portrait. Behind him, majestic pines tower above him, some of which I swear still frame many of the cabins that exist here on campus today.

I guess I’ve always been into Camp’s archives. When I was a kid I used to come in here a lot, mainly because it’s the only place on Camp that is air conditioned. That, and I’ve always liked history too: I got a 4 on my APUSH and Euro exams.  

Aimlessly, I walk around the room, pawing at old photos, postcards with pictures of  Main Campus before Mess and The Hall were built, and others with both buildings but no peewee baseball field that would eventually be erected just beyond them. 

In printed photos from a long time ago, mostly in black and white, there are blond boys playing basketball on gravel courts, and other blond boys, a little older, in mid-motion around what looks like a mud track. There are photos from the ‘80s and ‘90s, mostly in color, featuring blond kids singing in what looks like talent shows of different interactions, and blond kids around a campfire pressed forward toward a blond counselor clearly telling a story of some kind.

Around the room are images of balding white dudes, Camp’s former directors with portraits of their own. Christian Konig (director, 1910-1940), Steven Plith (director, 1940-1944), Art Beasly (director, 1945-1961), John “Sticky” Williams (director, 1961-1977), Michele Starffon (director, 1978-1992), and Hap Dickinson (1993-present). I imagine myself on the wall, brown and dignified, a few laugh crickles around the eyes. I’d have wispy blond hair too, changing over to white. 

I randomly pull a set of binders off an enormous bookcase, and am delighted to find press clippings from 1984, when Camp Brunah was celebrating its 75 birthday. Improbably, there had been a profile of “Camp Brunah: America’s Camp” in the New York Times. 

I’m not sure how Brunah made the Times, or how the Times had decided to declare it “America’s Camp,”  but this article must have been pretty dope press for Camp. The copy of the story is accompanied by a few burry photos of shirtless skinny-fit kids, and counselors in short shorts laughing by what looks like Swim-Station, with a long since removed water slide and a huge diving board. Amazingly, if you look really closely, there appears to be a Black kid in the photo, just behind the water slide. He’s got no discernable facial features visible save his obvious darkish skin and nappy hair. 

I stare for a long while at this oddity, a speck of melanin in the sea of Aryan youth, and I wonder. Then, without realizing it, I begin reading the article: 

“...Camp Brunah was founded by Grover A. Brunah in the spirit of altruism that so characterized his generation. A confirmed bachelor who made his small fortune on land speculation around the Adirondack Park in north-eastern New York, Brunah sought a way to give back to generations after him. Opportunity came knocking when the nascent Young Men’s Christian’s Association (YMCA) sounded the clarion call for investors in “formative experiences for boys.”  

“ ‘My goal,’ Brunah said in one of the Camp’s first publications shared with the Times  by Brunah’s board of trustees, ‘is to establish a place for city boys to breathe fresh air!’ ” 

“While Brunah did not live to see the full realization of his plan, a casualty of a hunting accident in 1911, his legacy lives on in this vibrant sleep-away camp on the shore of Lake Champlain.” 

I’m getting that fuzzy feeling in my head again, like I second hand smoked some bad shit, or maybe I’m having one of them episodes Shayla says I might be prone to, but then I remember  she might not want us to talk to no more so I don’t want to think about what she thinks anyway. 

No doubt though, I’m feeling funny. Like I already know this story about Brunah—-like I been knowing it. 

Grover A. Brunah, something murmurs in the back of my head:

A 40 year old bachelor committed to philanthropy. A dude who’d courted a woman nearly 20 years his junior who’d been into God, and kindness, and civility, and honesty. She’d also been very into Brunah’s “small” fortune, but that, of course, was merely a practicality. One had to live in society, after all. 

Blinking myself out of this outrageous reverie, a fiction obviously constructed in some hidden corner of my mind, I return to the New York Times story in front of me. 

“We aren’t a Christian Camp,” Brunah’s 5th director Michele Straffon said, “but we do espouse the important values on which our great country was founded upon. In Camp’s 75 year history, we haven’t lost sight of just how important those values are.”

Yes, something within me agrees, my mind unspooling into fantasy. “American Values.” 

Brunah went to a Protestant Church and came to understand America’s most fundamental tenet: that God truly helps those who help themselves. There he is with his big ass mustache, sitting in church and realizing just how how closely this ethos aligned with his own work, especially as he’d quite successfully helped himself to the hefty inheritances of his business partners over the years, whose trusts had helped close many “deals'' he'd made on plots across the North East. “Land Speculation.” 

He helped himself to a society pedigree too. A Harvard man, class of 1882, but he’d never been to college. The son of a doctor, but his father was a builder or a welder or something. He came from Irish immigrants, not the French nobility oft repeated in camp lore.

I’m about to shut this binder of old press clippings, not bothering to finish the Times story.  What’s the point if my subconscious is just gonna shit all over the fabulous, the anointed, the incredible Grover P. Brunah? As if in a race with my closing of the press binder, a million thoughts stream into my mind: 

Ultimately, the reason Brunah’s marriage to that church woman never came to be is because of Brunah’s unfailing “honesty.”  The chick had been simultaneously courted by Brunah and some other dude, a military man who happened to have actually been a Harvard man, class of ‘82. That person had naturally never heard of Brunah, thus setting off a cascading revelation of untruths that caused Brunah’s life to be rather unpleasant in the upper echelons of the city he’d come to inhabit. 

So, with a budding sense of piety and just a touch of shame, Brunah turned his attention to a more noble cause than land to embark on a journey out of New York City where he’d made home, up north in the North Country. There, he really would do God’s work. 

 My mind is whirring over the real and the imagined history of Grover A., whirling faster and faster until I slam the binder shut.  My hands close around either side of my head, and I close my eyes just for a moment of calm that my jumbled thoughts are invariably racing toward.  

That boy. The one with no face and nappy hair in the 1984 Times photo. Don’t I know him?

In Defense of Negroes

Some years ago, I began my remedial English class with what I believed was a slam dunk: Richard Wright’s autobiographical sketches, “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow.” We were just getting into annotation techniques, so this was definitely an ambitious text to begin with. To be sure, the space and place in the writing was often unfamiliar to students, though the racial violence articulated certainly wasn’t—stop and frisk New York was full of episodes racial violence against Black and brown bodies. 

For me, one of the more painful parts of teaching Wright, love him as I do, was a matter of idiom. Wright is of a different era in America—for him, Black folks weren’t “Black” or “African-American”---they were “Negroes.” And as a self respecting person proud of his race and teaching all students of color, I just had to say something. 

 “It’s ok for Wright to use “Negro,” I’d tell my writing class, citing the early 20th century depicted, “but you should studiously avoid it. It’s offensive.” And that would be that—offense mitigated!  

In Wright’s world, “Negroes” were subject to police brutality. They were beaten for “looking like they might do something", castrated for the mere suspicion of miscegenation, and brutally oppressed for “putting on airs” by using vocabulary that seemed “above” them. Wright talks about his learning to dissemble and outright lie in the Jim Crow south as a way of surviving his youth. 

But, when Wright moves north to Memphis from Mississippi, and then eventually to Chicago and New York, he is still marginalized. In Black Boy, Wright tells us that the “Negroes” around him are wage workers, low paid with few prospects for social mobility. Many are under educated, living in squalid ghetto conditions. Others are incarcerated. Wright himself suffers from food insecurity, terrible housing, poor health care, and a world that seems destined to snuff out the light of him and his dark skinned community. 

By the 1960s, Wright had died (after becoming an expat having moved to Paris some years before), but America still continued on with “Negro.” It was a hopeful era.  Kennedy announced in his inaugural address at the top of the decade that the USA would go to the moon by the end of the decade, and through ingenuity, political will, astronomical capital  (get it?), leftover Nazi personnel, and maybe a little dumb luck, we did it—we were moon bouncers by July of 1969!

 “Negroes” of the era had a ton of gains that old folks of all ilks love to gloat about. Lots of legislation was passed. Voting! Fair Housing! And yet caste oppression cemented into an” intractable problem” in the middle of the civil rights movement.

In many cases, Black folks still lived in squalid conditions, unable to get loans, stymied from getting higher education and higher paid jobs.  Many “Negroes”  were mourning the death of Malcolm (shot) and Martin (shot) and Bobby (shot) and all the boys who went to war for a country whose founding document, the constitution, makes him 3/5ths of a man (shot shot shot).  We’d figured out how to safely carry humans more than two-hundred-thousand miles from Earth, but somehow, truly changing the abhorrent living conditions of Black Americans—well, it just couldn’t be done.

The 1980s was a transformative decade: Martin Luther King day was given to us. The Ivy League was heavy into affirmative action, and Michelle got into Princeton. Barack eventually went to Columbia. Political ads always featured a Black face somewhere, and Michael Jackson became the biggest star ever. Oh, and, we weren’t “Negroes” any more. Thanks to folks like Jesse Jackson, we were now African-Americans, seven syllables over 2 words to replace that old “Negro.”  

By the 90s, Michelle and Barack? They’d graduated from Harvard Law! Yes, the 80s crack epidemic had spilled into 90s crack mass incarceration. Sure, the living conditions in public housing in many cities were absolutely horrific. Ok, Property taxes soared, leaving many Black folks, still living on the margins, with terribly funded schools. Alright, Rodney King was assaulted by the police, and he was just the most high profile case of the decade. We weren’t “Negroes,” Goddammit. Celebrate that fact. We certainly did in the 2000s and 2010s!

Two years ago, in 2020, after George Floyd was murdered and Breonna Taylor was murdered and Ahmaud Arbery was murdered—this was a few years after Sandra Bland was murdered and 12 year old Tamir Rice was murdered and teens Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown were murdered and Eric Garner was murdered—two years ago, we really hit the jackpot. Juneteenth became a national holiday. Post office is closed. African Americanas mourned John Lewis’s death and talked about “good trouble” with white allies everywhere. Portland white folks lost their minds with all that chanting and marching for Black folks. Oh yes, we weren’t just African-Americans that summer: we were Black, and our lives mattered too. One could see it by the spray painted BLM signs on the street, as faded now in memory as it is on the pavement, trampled under foot or rolled over by cars. Black Lives Matter!

Armed with a new federal holiday and a new honorific, America kept right along incarcerating Blacks, killing Blacks, relegating Blacks to terrible schools and squalid housing, and limiting our life chances. But, and really, I can’t stress this enough, especially to my students: “The term ‘Negro’ is offensive.” 

It is offensive because it recalls the violence of the Jim Crow south. Of the limitations imposed on Black folks up north. Of the seeming indifference to actually change structures of oppression, Black president or not. It is offensive because it calls out our white supremacist nation that did not need a white supremacist in the Whitehouse to firmly and consistently espouse those values. It is offensive because it exposes a secret that’s not really so hush-hush: That America is more interested in changing the title of my subjugated caste than it is in actually overturning the heinous conditions of my oppression. The will that sent us to the stars some fifty-odd years ago does not exist to liberate me from my subjugation. “Negro” is offensive because it is jussst right, a little too“on the nose.” I am a Negro. And so too are many of my students. 

Camp Ghost: Part III

 I used to think that eventually, I was going to kill Gramps. It was a fleeting notion, the kind of thing that would hit me when he was walking me home from my after-school program by Marcus Garvey Park, way over to where we lived on Amsterdam and 1-2-4. 

Keep in mind, I’d been making this trek home myself for weeks since Moms had taken an afternoon shift at the hospital. But somehow, she believed traipsing across Harlem together would bond us. I wonder if Gramps believed it too, because he never failed to show up, always punctual.

No matter the weather or the temperature, Gramps walked to Harlem from his teaching gig  across the 3rd Avenue Bridge in the Bronx. There he was an instructor of remedial mathematics at the community college, which mostly meant he taught grown folks algebra. 

“It’s a skill most normal kids master by 8th grade” he’d huff, usually after complaining about his students’ “inferior minds.” I guess you could say he was equally brutal to himself, insisting that he be “honest” about his role at the college. 

 “I’m a lecturer, NOT a professor,” he once snarled at Ms. Johnson, the after school teacher, after she’d called him “Professor Owen.”  

Then, he’d turned sweet, batting his eyes at her in a flirtatious manner that I suppose most have worked for him when he was younger. 

“The boy told you I was a famous thinker, huh? He just loves putting on airs.”

To be fair, I had started telling people Gramps was a “scientist,” hoping that folks’ own imagination would do the rest of the work. Sometimes I said he was an “astrophysicst,” a word I’d learned after watching a late night special on the 1969 moon landing. Sometimes I said he was a biochemist, a term my fifth grade teacher kept saying that all of us “dark skinned children  of the sun” might become, if we just believed and achieved. 

Making Gramps out to be something greater than he was seemed like the biggest insult I could deliver, but I can’t explain quite how I came to that conclusion.  It was likely an unconscious nod at what I came to understand was Gramps’ deep insecurity about not having a PhD, but I was a long way from figuring that out.  Maybe, I thought, the other kids at after school would believe that the man who’d started picking me up from after-school every day was some sort of high yellow Albert Einstein. 

I mean, he sort of looked like Einstein, with that huge uncombed pure white ‘fro.

“You remember what I taught you about addition and subtraction,” he’d say, launching into teacher mode as we began the journey west across town. He insisted that we walk the whole way, decrying buses to be a “waste of capital.” It was a perfect opportunity for him “to sure up [my] algebra fundamentals,” young as I was. 

“The game is ‘seventeen’,” he announced one freezing afternoon on our odyssey across Harlem. I nodded like he’d asked me if I'd wanted to play. 

“Four” he’d spit out in that tremulous voice of his, dry and pedantic. 

“Thirteen.” I’d reply.

“Sixteen,” he’d say, somehow fitting a whole lecture into a single word.  

“One,” I’d snap back. 

“Twenty-Five”

“Negative eight” 

“Forty-two”

“Uh, negative, uh, negative—”

But by the time I’d find “negative twenty-five,” I was already bracing myself for a blow to the back of my head that would invariably cause me to bite down on my tongue. You could always tell if Gramps was living with us based on whether I lisped or not. 

“Let’s try again,” he’d say after a while, the cheerful didact. “Excellence takes discipline, you hear?”

Tears in my eyes and murder on my heart, I’d mumble “Yes sir,” my goal to please Gramps, or at least to avoid getting walloped upside the head.  

“What are you thinking about?” asks Hearts, next to me in the passenger seat of his whip, a Jeep Cherokee that’s probably a decade old. I don’t have my driver’s license, but it’s a straight shot down Brunah road, from the school house back to campus. It’s crazy to think that just yesterday I’d walked this distance—it now feels an expanse of interminable darkness. 

The car’s back seat is crammed—Bryant and Paolo, and a dude I don’t know very well named Willie. He’s an old man who will soon be 30, a counselor who'd actually been there even back in my earliest days here as a Peewwee. He comes back year after year, his gig as an English teacher accommodating his Neverland habit, what he manages to unironically describe as his “vernal lust” for camp.

“What if I just kill him?” I say to no one in particular, pulling into the counselor parking lot just above main campus. 

“Ahhhhh” yawns Hearts, blazed as fuck. “There’s no killing an unblemished spirit.”

Gramps liked going to a Columbia bar at 110th and Amsterdam. A lot of nights, he ordered a sloppy burger called “The Chubby Mexicano,” with guac and salsa. Then, he’d down six to twelve beers followed by two 40s of Tecante for the wavering stagger home.

 I never observed all this myself of course, but I caught it from the back and forth Mom would have on the phone, tense and teary and always hush-hush. I think she believed she was negotiating with Gramps’ wife, a formidable woman both Moms and I both called Miss Roxy. Mostly though, she was just taking orders. 

“That woman has some nerve kicking him out of his own apartment,” Moms would say, frantically vacuuming the tiny living room that would become Gramps’ bedroom while he stayed with us. “He doesn’t have a drinking problem, I mean not really,” she’d continue, looking at me as though I’d said otherwise. “He’s a math whiz for heaven’s sake!”

Health professional that she was, common sense just didn’t seem to apply when it came to Gramps. In her mind, his occupation somehow negated his compulsion. 

Around the third or fourth week Gramps came to live with us that first time, he barreled into my room real late. In fact, it was 2:04am, the exact hour and minute immortalized in my mind by the Nickelodeon alarm clock I’d received for Christmas that year. Incidentally, I’d also gotten the TV in my room that Christmas. Moms said my father had finally sent her a check, and it was a big fat one too.

“The game is 'ten',” Gramps shouted, storming in with Hulk-like vigor. He’d flung my bedroom door so hard against the wall that the knob left a dent still there to this day. 

“Hey Gramps, um, I thin—”

“Shut up,” he’d blasted, sitting heavily on my bed. 

“Four!” 

“Uh, uh, Six”

“Uh uh, NOTHING,” he’d said, snatching the sheets from my body and pushing me to the floor. 

“Eight” He barked. 

“Two,” I fumbled, rolling to my knees. 

“What are you, a street whore now? Stand up, God Dammit!  Negative fourteen!”

I struggled to my feet, desperately trying to see straight and wipe away the sleep somehow still grasping at me. Moms must have been home, had probably been there for a couple of hours, but I heard no stirring next door, no marshaling of the cavalry. 

“Don’t play dumb with me boy,” he hissed, grabbing me by my thin t-shirt, and viciously tossing me into the steel-poled corner of the bed bedframe. “Negative fourteen.”

“Gramps,” I pleaded, “I wanna sleep, I wanna—can we just do this in the morning?”

His blood shot eyes stared deep into mine, unblinking. He’d bent down to within inches of my face, the malt liquor filling up my nostrils. 

"Don't make me say it again," he husked.

I liked reading horror books back around that age. You know, like, the Goosebumps series with ghosts and evil spirits, and creepy magic. From my “research”, I could have told you that fear has the power to paralyze your limbs, and make them want to fling themselves into violent action. I could have explained that fear can make your heart beat something wild, and halt it in your chest. I could have pontificated on fear’s ability to wipe your brain clean, and yet overload it with trillions of disjointed thoughts. I could have written my own novel about how fear can freeze your tongue and at the same time make you want to scream, top volume. I could have riffed on fear’s ability to make you thirst for water, yet quake with the need to release an overloaded bladder.  

I’d read a lot about fear. But that night, I really learned about it.

“Take off your drawers,” he said simply, pulling the belt from his corduroys. 

With trembling hands I pushed down the “Aaahh-Real Monsters!!!” boxers that covered my junk,  and stood before the old man, wondering at the nightmare I’d found myself in. I still hoped Mom would bust through the door at any moment, but I’ve since learned that hope is not a particularly useful strategy, especially in crisis. 

“Turn around,” he commanded, standing me before the wall adjoining my bed. 

That night, Gramps gave me eleven lashings, one for every year I’d been on earth. He managed to land them mostly on my ass, but a few of them, I think lash 2 and 4, struck me in my back, causing me to convulse all over. I’d never been hit like that before, with the full strength of a grown man.  

“Excellence takes discipline, '' he slurred on his way out, twitching from the tremendous effort he’s just exerted. 

I'm shaking now as we make our way over the massive hill that blocks the upper lot from Main Campus. Hearts, Paolo and Willie break towards the woods by Swim Station where the older kids’ cabins are situated, while Bryant walks next to me toward the Peewee units.

“You hearing music tonight?” I ask, just to disrupt the reverie threatening to overwhelm me. I point at the Hall, all barnlike and spooky. 

Bryant looks over at the darkened theater and laughs out loud. 

“Black people imitating white people imitating Black people,” he says, like he’s quoting from a school reader. 

“Jazz, right?” I’ve moved over to 3rd base of the Peewee baseball field to relieve the sudden urge of my bladder. 

“Not jazz, man. Ragtime. Early 20th century.”

“Right,” I say, shaking out the last drops of piss. 

“Hey Bryant, listen,” I blurt, the idea suddenly coming alive in my head. “Is… Is Owen really gonna run Swim Station this summer? ”

“I don’t know, are you?” Bryant shoots back, his voice distant and cold but somehow mirthful at the same time.

We walk a couple steps in silence, and then I just can’t help myself. 

“Hap promised me if I came back this summer I could be in charge, and I got my lifeguard certification and everything, so I just feel like it would be fucked up it—-”

“Dude, please give it a rest.” 

Bryant turns so the maglight he’s been using to guide us shines straight into my eyes.

 “It was funny for a while, but like, everyone’s laughing at you now.”

“Oh,” I say. 

I know what he means, but I don’t have a clue what he’s talking about. I want him to explain, but hope he’ll just let it hang there. Fear is a tangle of contradictions, and hope is never a strategy. 

“Seriously, man,” continues Bryant, “ I’m just being a pal.” He holds the light steady in my face, and I stay stock still, taking it. 

After a while, he swings the flashlight away from me, heading towards the trail to his cabin. 

“I don’t care what you call yourself, but it’s getting fucking weird,” he concludes, disappearing into the woods. 

Beside me, visible in the dark, Owusu cheeses big and nods his head in agreement.