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?
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