Venus Drive

Admiral of the Swiss Navy

I can’t remember the name of the camp. It was somewhere near a lake near Canada. I learned a good deal there that I would later rely upon when I threw away my youth. What I learned when I threw away my youth was crucial in my development as a misdirected man, so maybe it’s all connected. What they say about character is true, though I can’t quite remember what they say about it.

That summer we used to get stroke books for us to stroke ourselves with at bedtime. We used to get them from this trunk our counselor dragged between our cots.

“Dig in, faggots,” he’d say.

We were all of us vicious getting to the good ones. We’d never seen stuff like this in our towns.

Some of us used to go smoke cigarettes behind the Port-O-Sans. Mr. Marv caught us one time, wanted to make a point. He was going to send us packing, which I guess is not a big deal looking back, but at the time it was seen as a stain. Plus to have your dad drive up in that sad kind of station wagon. What I did was give Mr. Marv some of the names he needed. I gave him the names of boys you’ve never heard of but who were known saboteurs of good camp citizenship. I’m not sorry I did it, either. If I saw those boys today, I’d say, “You brought it on yourselves.”

I did see one of them in a coffee shop once. It’s doubtful he made me. His eyes had the ebb of his liver in them and he bore the air of a man who looks right at you and only sees the last of himself.

“Don’t worry,” I told him. “You didn’t miss anything that year. Except maybe Van Wort.”

“Who are you?” he said.

“I’m the ghost of Van Wort,” I said, and got out of there. There’s no gain in having a fellow goner watch you order all-night eggs.

Van Wort was the fat kid who put our camp all over the local news that summer, and if you were localized near Canada and watching TV back then, you might have caught my debut. I was the one standing in the dining hall saying, “He brought it on himself.”

I don’t think I believed that, even then, but I guess I wanted to say something memorable, something beyond my years. I could have said what a terrible tragedy it all was, but Mr. Marv seemed to be in charge of that part.

Mr. Marv was probably of a type but I only ever knew him. He wore swim togs and parted his hair like a magician. They said he was a teacher of history in the winter somewhere. That summer, though, he was just Mr. Marv, blitzed at the bonfire, babbling on about the time he was a kid and sneaked into a ball game. He had come to see this DiMaggio take the field on bad feet. Bone spurs, Mr. Marv told us, ankle damage, the last of the brave.

What was he talking about, bone spurs?

What’s so brave about that?

I slept next to Van Wort. I listened to the air whistle in and out of his fat chest. He said he had a chronic bronchial. He said it like a lie he made up a long time ago.

I watched them come to him night after night, boys with their mosquito sprays, their shampoos, tennis rackets and combs, warm water in toothbrush cups. Van Wort was fat and his name was Van Wort. With that combination, why would you pack your kid off to camp? Let him play with ladybugs in the safety of his own lawn.

The counselor with the stroke books tortured Van Wort, too. He was just a mean kid with more years on him, more muscles, a denser perm. He wore a spoon medallion. His name was Steve, or maybe Ivan, and his stroke trunk was deep. When we got through the first batch he hauled out some more. These were magazines that didn’t even have real magazine names. They just said what was in them, the way creamed corn at the market just said creamed corn on the can.

Steve-Ivan called Van Wort Van Wort Hog. Or Fat Fucking Shit, for short. He was the one who told us to piss in Van Wort’s canteen. It was the best canteen in the bunk, brand new, fuzzy wool, a cavalry sleeve. We took turns pissing in it and dipping it down in the Port-O-San hole. We left it under his short-sheeted bed.

When he found it his eyes went dark, his great arms started wibbling, wobbling on his knees. The canteen, he told us, was a gift from his dead father.

“It’s just a joke you fat fucking shit,” said Steve-Ivan. “We’re your friends.”

“Really?” said Van Wort. He looked as though he was ready to believe this, or wanted to be ready.

“Sure,” said Steve-Ivan. “Just don’t be a Van Wort Hog and run crying to Mr. Marv.”

Van Wort stopped crying and he didn’t run but he went to see Mr. Marv. Steve-Ivan was somebody’s cousin near Canada, though. The whole thing blew, as they say, over.

I got damn good at boxball during this period. I was, if you will, the boxball king. Maybe it’s not crucial to the story of Van Wort, but I think people should know.

We did a camp-wide Capture-the-Flag. I wasn’t in Van Wort’s unit, but I can tell you things got pretty hairy out there. What happened to this one girl in the beet field was a shame. We never did know what the rules were, or which kids were still living or dead. My unit just marauded around. We laid waste to Mr. Marv’s azaleas and tied a boy to the tetherball pole. Then we lucked into view of the flag, this dinky fluorescent thing like the kind for a sissy bar, planted on a hill. Mr. Marv was up there with some other campers.

“Don’t let the heathens flank us, you curs!” we heard him shout.

We flanked them hard. We flew up along a ridge near the tennis courts. Van Wort appeared out of nowhere with a croquet mallet in his hands. Some of us batted the mallet away and beat Van Wort to the dirt. I led the rest of the unit on the resumed flanking maneuver. I didn’t want to know what they were doing to Van Wort.

Mr. Marv noticed our wild charge a little too late.

I lowered my head, took flight.

“The day is lost!” he said, as I hit. “Our Lord has forsaken us for vile Moors!”

“Vile Moors,” he kept saying, which I didn’t get at the time, but I see now was because we had Black Sean with us and it was Black Sean who took the flag.

Then the agony of having your nuts crushed by an airborne boy, it must have suddenly arrived on Mr. Marv. The man shut up.

Victory equaled a sack of candy bars, to be divided evenly among all living members of our unit.

Van Wort spent the night in the infirmary, though a boy who was there for a spider bite said there were no visible marks.

We played Freeze-Please every breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Steve-Ivan would say “Freeze, Please” while we were eating and we’d all go stone-cold statue. Whoever moved first was Admiral of the Swiss Navy, which meant you had to scrape and stack the dishes, bus them over to Black Sean’s mother in the kitchen.

The Swiss have no navy, but who knew that then?

We called Van Wort the Commodore because he couldn’t hold still. I think it was unfair, really, because it wasn’t so much him as his fat that was moving, if that makes any sense at all. Study a fat kid hard and it might.

“Well, it looks like another lucky day for the Hog,” Steve-Ivan said one morning.

“I’ll help him,” I said.

Everyone gawked, as though I’d been struck with sudden bolts of faggot lightning, but it was just this feeling I had, that Van Wort was getting a bad break.

He wasn’t so off. He wasn’t even weird. It wasn’t like he wrote bird poems or wore the wrong kind of underwear.

“Why are you doing this?” said Van Wort.

“Just because.”

“I don’t care what you do to me,” said Van Wort. “If it’s a trick, it’s a trick.”

We were quiet and stacked for a while.

“So,” I said, “who killed your dad?”

“Nobody killed him,” said Van Wort. “He dropped dead. I saw it.”

“No shit,” I said. “You saw it?”

“He went blue and had a bubble on his mouth.”

“What’d you do?”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“Didn’t you give him mouth to mouth?”

“He had a bubble there.”

Some of us were smoking behind the Port-O-Sans after lights out when Steve-Ivan wandered by. We had figured him for off to the bars on the highway by now.

“Hey, it’s lights out,” said Steve-Ivan.

“We know,” I said.

“That means lights out out.”

“I said we know,” I said.

“Don’t wise off to me,” said Steve-Ivan. “You think you’re special just because you’ve been going for those hog rides?”

This was wit near Canada. The boys did a round of barnyard jokes about me and Van Wort.

“So, what’s it like, sucking on the bacon?” said Steve-Ivan.

They called me Bacon from then on.

I didn’t mind the cracks, but I missed the camaraderie.

I calcified, got crusty. I lost my boxball crown.

Each night they came to his bed where he lay wheezing. It wasn’t even foot powder and Indian burns anymore. They wanted to hurt him, to make him bleed. They taped him down to the bed frame, went at it with tweezers and pocket knives. They got his sock bunched up for a ball gag. They pinched off pieces of him with nail clippers and tiny sewing shears from kits their mothers had packed because it was on the list.

I’d get up and walk to the other end of the bunk until they were done.

In the morning I’d help him clean up, wipe down the blood until it was just dark nicks.

We talked about everything except what they did to him.

We talked about the day’s activities, the boats, the beads, the weaving. We talked about our dreams the night before.

He told me he had gun dreams where the gun wouldn’t shoot, falling dreams where he fell into a stilled river that had his father’s face in its bed. He had one where all the girls at the girls’ camp were rolled out on a float for his fancy. I told him he should keep a dream diary and he told me he did, showed me a spiral-bound notebook with his entries. It read:

GUN

GIRLS

RIVER

RIVER

RIVER

He told me he had given the eulogy at his father’s funeral, that it was easy, he’d just used an essay he’d written for school and substituted “my father” for “our founding fathers.”

I started to admire Van Wort. But then I’d hate him for being so weak. He’d given up even the shrieking and they rarely bothered to gag him anymore.

“Why don’t you fight back?” I said.

“What’s the point?”

“The point is you show them you’re not a pussy. Then they leave you alone.” I believe I’d first heard this argument advanced by a talking beagle on one of those claymation shows the Lutherans used to produce.

“Will you help me?” he said.

“No,” I said. “That would be wrong.”

“Why?”

“It’s complicated,” I said.

Then it was the last day of camp. We packed all our stuff in duffels. Tomorrow we would strip our beds and get into our family wagons, wave.

At our last lunch Steve-Ivan said that Van Wort and I would be voted camp love-birds at the camp banquet that night.

“Vote us whatever the fuck you want,” I said.

“Oh, you little bitch,” said Steve-Ivan.

We had to stack without even a Freeze-Please and Van Wort wouldn’t look at me.

“What’s wrong with you?” I said.

“I’m done with this,” said Van Wort.

I took that to mean that he was going to do something, make himself the last of the brave. What he meant, though, was that he was truly done. Van Wort took a canoe out to the middle of the lake. We were doing free swim and we heard him call to us, watched him drink from a big plastic jug and just sort of bend over, roll off the bow into the lake. You’d figure drowning would be hard going to begin with, all that lung smash and lung stove and no air to dream of rivers anymore, but picture it with your guts burning off from a stolen jug of kitchen lye. Steve-Ivan dove in to save him but Van Wort was too fat. We watched them bob together in the middle of the lake. Then Steve-Ivan was bobbing up and down alone. He swam back weeping, or maybe it was the water.

They got Van Wort’s body out with a special boat. They had him in a strap swinging off the gunwale. His swim trunks trailed out from his feet and you could see all the night wounds on him.

“Self-mutilation,” said Mr. Marv. “Interesting.”

The news trucks drove up that afternoon.

Van Wort’s father appeared, too. He was a skinny man in a sun hat. He stood on the shoreline shouting at no one in particular. I walked up to him.

“I’m Bacon,” I said. “I was his friend.”

“Were you his Judas, too?” said Mr. Van Wort. He busted me a tough one on the jaw. Then he took me to his bony chest.

“I didn’t mean that,” he said. “I know you were his friend. Bobby wrote me about you.”

I had long forgotten Van Wort was also a Bobby, if I ever knew.

I wonder if his father saw me on the newscast that night.

“Friend of the Victim,” they flashed across my heart.

I was voted Most Humane at the camp banquet. Black Sean was Leadership Qualities. His mother cried. Steve-Ivan got up with a God’s Eye he claimed Van Wort had woven for him and Mr. Marv led us in a Moment of Silent Reflection.

Van Wort, Mr. Marv told us, had touched all of our lives.

He may have just been talking, like he did about the bone spurs, but he was also right. I put on a ton of weight in school that year, got jumped and beat in my town a lot. It felt good, like I was getting free of something, but I never let on that I was enjoying myself. Then I found a severe diet, sought welcome from a band of semi-evil people. We were all nearly beautiful and eager to destroy each other for it. I had the kind of time where you don’t notice the time going by, but it did.