redeyevision

A camp experience can merit a blog all on its own, but sometimes, you have to settle for the abridged version. No matter how much technology supposedly improves our lives, we'll still only have 24 hours in a day to work like a jigsaw puzzle.

And that's why I'm trying to talk my younger sister out of having a second child. Even with unlimited resources to devote to the lovable rugrat, it still doesn't stop the clock. The law of marginal utility applies to children too.

But that's another story. In a way.

You see, one time...and I'm naming names here. All names used are real to the best of my elephant memory.

It's true I have a good memory, and that can be a curse. Evidently, marijuana can impair the learning process in the moment, but I for one suspect marijuana alone, scarcely dents the long-term storage capacity.

I inherited this memory from my paternal grandfather, who at 88, could remember with great detail, his hitch-hiking trip to California during the thirties. He could also tell you who attended his 5th birthday party. This trait passed on to my dad and Shredder now exhibits acute function of the family curse.

The elder gents had terribly weak legs that got them down in their backs and that's why I spend so much time doing squats, to compensate. Everyone compensates for some family shortcoming.

But what I'm trying to say is that I spent the summer of '97 as a bunk counselor and beginning guitar teacher in the rock shop, which was a clever name for the music department, at Camp Island Lake with a post office box of Starucca, PA. Maybe it's spelled Starruca or something similar.

The government must have given ample land grants sometime in history, to tons of children's camps in the area of Northeastern Pennsylvania and Southeastern New York.

I don't know if you've ever done this sort of thing before, but it's madcap. Run by Jewish owners, there's a gazillion nationalities represented and even though it's an expensive arts and sports camp 'for the kids', there's a lustful undercurrent that says, hook up with whoever, however.

Like an idiot, I went up with my girlfriend.

Guys can actually feel like a veritable piece of meat in that camp.

"You don't bring your girlfriend to camp," one vixen sternly reported to me.

She asked me out into the woods one night. Quickly. I just as quickly declined, feeling some strange attachment to my girlfriend who I rarely saw during the regimented days on the sprawling campus.

There were more and better invitations. One by the lovely Canadian, Olivia Breen, a reported Olympic alternate on the national figure skating team. She was too pretty for me to inquire as to her validity. Again, I declined. It must have been something my girlfriend's father told me before we left town to sleep for three months in the Catskills on wooden planks.

Two conditions turn women (and men) into non-descriminate pillow-biters:

1) continual, 24-hour exposure to fresh air
2) the opportunity to never see anyone from that camp or setting in your life again, ever.

Hotties fucked slobs they wouldn't have made eye contact with in high school or college.

Coverboys fucked pock-marked, cellulite transporting winches from Queens college. Or maybe it was Smiths. No wait, I used to listen to the Smiths. Wait, that happens anywhere, but you get the picture.

Had I had the keen foresight I should have had, I wouldn't have brought little Joanna with me. But it was her car we drove up in. You gotta dance with who brought you. I didn't stray for quite some time.

I wasn't naive as to the workings of human nature and opportunities. I just didn't envision it to be like shooting fish in a barrel.

My fellow bunkmate counselor was a crazy Israeli named Tzion. Every morning he asked me to pronounce his name correctly and pick out decent clothes for him to wear. I helped him write a love note to the object of his desire.

We got drunk at a local tavern, Lombardi's is the name. That's where the temptations increased. One night I drove into the mountains after a couple of beers and was stopped by New York state police. I failed a pocket breathilizer. I never forgot the officer admonishing me with, "you want to spend a night in a New York jail?"

We were so far out in the mountains he let us go because it was a logistical nightmare getting a tow-truck up there, plus I had no cash. He let my car mate, an English girl who had never driven before take us home at 15 mph.

Ahhh, it makes me come alive, thinking about going back there. There's not a better defintion for summer.

I thought that camp must have been in a particularly lustful latitude until I compared notes to counselors from other camps, other times, other places. Again, see the 2 listed reasons above.

"Let's go to camp!" said my sorority girl-girlfriend.

"Uh, o.k." And we did. Together.

I could have done Olivia Breen.

I did however, kiss one girl in the back of a pick-up truck on the way home from Lombardi's tavern, one star-blitzed night.

There was some tongue involved.

I even told Joanna about it, later, after we came back to Kentucky.

Damn! Memory and conscience.