My Camp Boyfriend

I loved summer camp. A lot. I was totally into the singing and campfires and banana boats.

Sidenote: If you’ve never had a banana boat, you are really missing out. They are the best things in the whole world. And they are really easy to make too. All you do is cut a banana down the center to form a long groove and then you stuff marshmallows and chocolate into the groove. Then you wrap the banana in tin foil and put it in the fire (I guess the oven would suffice for those of us who aren’t living in Africa, the 19^th century, or at camp). Then after about fifteen minutes, you take the banana out and eat it. It’s amazing.

Anyway, I loved camp. But my favorite part of camp was the camp dance which was held on the basketball court every Thursday night after dinner. The fact that it was on Thursday is very important, because that gave us enough time to find a camp boyfriend—that special someone to help you with archery, plot (but never carry out) elaborate schemes to sneak out after lights out, and most importantly to hold you at arms length and rock back and forth on the basketball court to the gentle strains of whatever totally PC music happened to be popular that summer.

Well, I was honestly never all that good at the camp relationship thing. I wasn’t like those camp sluts that rolled their wind shorts up to their asses and had to wear t-shirts when they went swimming because their swimsuits were too skimpy. I wasn’t about to throw away my kissing virginity on some pimply twelve-year old. (Also, I was insanely shy and socially inept as a kid.) But then came the year that I met Wholly Boy (I’m calling him that because these days he’s apparently decided to turn himself into a human colander through body piercing). Now Wholly Boy wasn’t wholly at the time. He seemed like a nice (maybe slightly overweight) boy. And, he was an intellectual.

My camp relationship with Wholly Boy began innocently enough with flirtation at the picnic tables and long-lingering glances across the dining hall at meals. We’d have long intellectual conversations that mostly consisted of him pontificating about things that he knew absolutely nothing about. I look back on it now and realize that he was full of shit, but at the time I was really impressed. I distinctly remember a conversation where he was explaining to me why I didn’t like to swim or canoe, but did like to ride horses which are much more dangerous. He told me that it was because I can’t control water, but I can control the horse. “Water has an untamed essence. No one can control water. It simply is and cannot be changed or controlled by anyone.” He actually said that. Later, he sent me a note via another boy in his cabin, asking me to the dance. Of course I said yes.

Well, Thursday rolled around and the all hell broke loose in the cabin as girls ran around fixing their hair and throwing clothes around looking for the perfect outfit for the night which could well be the most important night of their lives. I, of course, did the same thing. And after having tried on every item of clothing that I had packed, I finally decided on my denim skirt and a pink polo shirt. (OK, I have suddenly realized that my sense of style has not changed since childhood).

My cabin walked to the basketball court and we all scattered to find our dates. Well, the music started and people started to dance. I looked at Wholly Boy expectantly. And then he started to dance. Oh God, did he start to dance. I still look back on this moment with incredulity. I have never seen someone fail at dancing so badly. He wiggled and jiggled and his belly fat bounced to the music. And his pants crept ever so slowly down his hips until every deep-knee bend (Yes, there were deep knee bends. Many of them.) exposed his rather large plumber’s crack. In the space of a song, he had lost my respect. That intellectual façade he had created crumbled and I realized that he was just a fourteen year old boy with an amazingly large ego.

We broke up during the dance, because after having seen his performance, I suddenly lost my desire to dance and tried to get him to sit with me on the benches around the basketball court. He apparently thought that I was being controlling, so he broke up with me with the line “I’m not ready for a serious relationship.” Needless to say, I wasn’t upset.