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river rat: Bible Camp
Summer church camp was called bible camp where I grew up. Held at a former resort built in the Victorian era, the camp lasted two weeks and was the only time each year in seventy years the building was full. Its primary use as a sanatorium for consumption patients made me think life with TB wasn't all that bad. The building's footprint covered more than an acre supporting a fantastic three story wood framed palace with gracious balconies off every room and a three story ballroom that opened onto a courtyard full of fountains originally used as spa treatment baths. You could practically taste the chlorox used daily to whitewash the floors and baseboards.
The room I stayed four years in a row housed eight other campers from my church, almost all of them kids I'd known all my life, kids whose parents knew each other all their lives. Our church contingent filled two other rooms full of boys and three more just like ours full of girls.
The first night of my second year we didn't sleep. No one wanted to sleep when there was half a million square feet of building to explore, a hundred ninety seven girls we weren't supposed to touch sleeping on the other side of the building, and a counselor just down the hall who was rumored to have given beer to his little brother last year, maybe even weed. And no one could sleep with an honest to God ten acre lake close enough we could smell it and hear its bull frogs groan a chorus to the night.
"I'll suck anyone's dick for a quarter." Kid spoke out of the darkness in a high voice. He was older than us. He'd moved to town two years earlier and nobody knew anything about him, not even his real name, so we all called him Kid.
I remember when I first saw him I thought he looked like a weasel, but then thought that wasn't quite right. Something about how the information of his face -- his nose, eyes, eybrows, mouth, even his cheekbones -- was crammed too close together, like the rest of the front of his head was being saved for some other purpose.
"You're fulla shit." I think maybe all of us said it at once. "Go home, faggot." "Queer."
"A quarter." Kid repeated. "Twenty-five cent."
"Yer on." Trey Parkhurst yelled over all of us.
Trey was the littlest boy in our room but he got pubic hair two years earlier than anyone else and spent most of his time playing with himself and telling everyone the impossible things that shot out of him when he did it long enough. Boys who lived next door to Trey told us they caught him once jacking his dog like his mutt's stuff was a magic lantern and a genie was gonna' pop out if only he could shine it up real good.
"Come on up, chicken dick." Kid was on the top bunk of a triple decker, peeking his squinched up face at us from inside the hood of his head and hair. Trey camped out on the bottom bed farthest away from Kid's bed.
"You come down here."
"I'm the one workin'. You come here." Kid squawked, his head retreating back over the edge. "An' bring your quarter."
"Yer fulla shit."
"You'ens aint nothin' but chicken shits, all of ya."
Trey jumped over his bed and the next one, the one where I bunked, and then skittered up the end ladder to Kid's bunk.
We all got under Kid's bed on our knees and started chanting, and I'm not sure any of us had ever heard or seen anything like that done before, chanting that is, and it made us all so spooked out and uncomfortable how we did it the same way the same time that we abruptly stopped then started laughing. We got the giggles and then what I call the "gross outs" talking about Kid and Trey being gay and how it was perfect since Trey and gay rhymed. Then Trey fell to the floor and lay there still for about a minute and we were all silent.
"You owe me a quarter." Kid was hanging upside down from a steam pipe near the ceiling and I thought for the first time the animal he always reminded me of was a bat. A vampire bat only the kind who sucked dicks and not blood or maybe blood from dicks.
"You don't pay me an' that's a same as stealin'." Kid squeaked.
"F-f-fuck y-you." Trey groaned. "You bit me."
