Take Your Pants Off!: (And Stay a While) by Koelen

Author:Koelen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BookBaby
Published: 2020-12-08T15:29:15+00:00

GUNS

I was just fifteen-years-old. Two of my best friends from summer camp, Zach and Jake, were messing around with one of their dad’s hand-guns when it accidentally fired and blew Zach’s head off, right in front of his friend. Zach was just sixteen when he died. Jake was only fifteen. In a single instant, both of their lives were destroyed.

I’ll never forget the phone call I received from my estranged father, in another of his crowning patriarchal achievements: “Your friend from camp accidentally blew his head off. He’s dead. I’m sorry, son. Shit happens.”

…shit happens…

I was a troubled fifteen-year-old kid, and I had a lot to show for it. Some of the neighborhood kids and I were caught by the police using the basement of an empty house as a club house. I stole my mom’s car and wrecked it. And I was struggling to come to terms with my homosexuality and internalized homophobia. Life was not easy. I was fighting with everyone. My mother, my brother. Teachers. School. In just a few years’ time, I would become a social pariah—the source of everyone else’s schadenfreude.

I’d spent several summers living in St. Louis with my dad and step-mother, but that summer, I’d convinced them we’d all be better off if they sent me to a bad kid’s reform camp rather than a military school in the fall. I knew there was no way I would have survived an all-boys school in rural Missouri as a frail 5’3 closeted little gay boy. I belong at Hogwarts, not West Point. A military school? I cannot. All that discipline. All those guns. And none of my fruit-fly girl-friends to protect me from the constant bullying I’d endured thus far.

So bad kids camp it was. Armed with my Alanis Morissette and PUSA band T-shirts, I was forced to attend sixteen straight days in the woods with a bunch of other teenage wastelanders and counselors. I was preparing for Nazi Germany. By the time I arrived, I was ready for what was sure to be repeated beatings into militaristic submission: 5:00 am wake up calls, writing out our failures on chalkboards like Bart Simpson, cold showers, screaming drill sergeants, cane beatings, GI Jane, “Drop and give me fifty” realness—the whole nine yards. That is what I was mentally readying for.

Instead, what I found upon arrival was this very odd, but quaint, Kumbaya-my-Lord, Narnia-in-the-woods outside of St. Louis. It was run by a bunch of young thirty to forty-something hippies. Just like any other summer camp you or your kids attended or have seen on TV or at the movies, we did all of that outdoorsy shit and more. We rope climbed, zip-lined, canoed, swam, built campfires, told ghost stories, the works. But because we were troubled youth, they treated us all as adults—with love and adoration—in this parallel universe summer camp.

No one could do anything wrong. The twelve-year-olds smoking cigarettes? They had an addiction and a disease. Fourteen-year-olds drinking? “You’re going to be doing it behind our backs anyway.

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