Camptown Ladies (8 page)

Most of the buyers were men, but there was an occasional woman, and even one grandmother who posed with two younger generations of Tin Man buyers grinning toothlessly at the secret of the spring-loaded penis. Small veggie and soup can Tin Mans went for $10, while larger coffee can Tin Mans went for $15, and the tiny Tin Man went for $8. I noticed the smallest size had to forego the spring movement and thought it a shame. I decided that once the tin can artist opened up shop again I would have to get the large or medium Tin Man as a gift for Eddie.

The owner of the site is Ray, a fact deduced from a sign hung on his tree: “WELCOME TO MY SITE! I AM RAY, MAYOR OF THE CAMP!” The mayor may have loved his self-appointed position, but he didn’t trust his constituents; a fact revealed by the way he permanently soldered the feet of the Tin Man samples to an iron railing of his deck. Ray would be a guy I would have to meet. Next door to Ray the Mayor was a sign announcing the Town Sheriff, and two trailers after that was the Tax Collector, who had nailed a bucket to a tree with “Tax Donations” painted on the side and a promise to use the taxes for buying flowers for the shared areas of the campground.

I continued looking for Lisa and Vince, but my distractions had slowed me a bit. The trees were heavily dropping their brittle brick-colored
needles and would have to be attended to in order to keep the fire hazard low around the campfires. I decided I might take that project on, since, strangely, Lisa had not assigned me a job.

As I looked up at a particularly tall pine, I wondered if my sister thought I was in too fragile of a state to boss around. That would be a first, I thought, as the pine tree reminded me of a dream I had last night. It had waited for just the right moment to sneak up on me with a memory of a dream about Lorn. Cruel how dreams can do that, lie dormant all day, then sneak attack when you least expect it.

In the dream, I had been in California, looking up at a palm tree, which I noticed was branded PALM TREE along the entire length of the trunk. I looked around and realized every palm tree in sight had been branded this way. It was then in the dream that Lorn approached me, sliding her hand into mine.

“Beautiful, aren’t they?” she said.

“I guess,” I answered, but I wanted to tell her the branding of the trunks concerned me. Instead, I kept it to myself and tried to admire the perfect palm fronds bursting at the top, each tree identical to the one that stood beside it. This was when I noticed that the underside of the palms looked as if they had been molded from a green plastic and realized in dismay that none of them were real. The trees I had passed by and admired each day on the way up to my house in Hollywood Hills had been fake, and it struck me now that the dream made me feel they were tackier than a penis-popping Tin Can Man.

In the dream, I had looked at Lorn, noticing her hair was not the same stunning auburn red I had loved so much, and wondered if the color had been fake as well. “I love you,” she said, interrupting my thoughts. “Not enough,” I’d answered in the dream, and her hand slipped out of mine.

A distant banging broke me out of the memory and I walked toward it to find Lisa and Vince attempting to repair a bathhouse. Lisa was in the more dangerous roof position, while Vince was below her, handing her the supplies.

She was yelling down to Vince. “I’m thinking if this particular shitter ends up being on the Camp Camp boys side, I should have
glory holes built right into the bathroom stall walls. Sort of a nice perk, don’t you think?”

“I guess,” Vince answered, paling at the thought.

“In the long run, it’ll save us from some hack job, since you know they’ll cut the holes anyway. This way, we cut a professional hole, and maybe even line it with some vinyl padding, just to avoid a lawsuit when some horn dog gets a splinter in his dick.”

Lisa let go of her toolbox and it slid off the roof, carrying a strip of shingles with it, raining down the other side of the building.

“Whoops,” Lisa said, “accidents happen.”

Vince said, “Yeah, well it might be a good time for me to tell you about Martina. The neighbor’s kid didn’t do it.” She glared at him. “It was their fucking dog.”

I yelled over to them, “You guys really need to wait for the contractor, or someone’s going to get hurt!”

Lisa said, “Hey Marie, as long as you are doing nothing, go get Eddie to pick a good color for the vinyl to line the holes in the men’s bathrooms. I’ll try to figure out a way to advertise it without being tacky. Something like: ‘All the men’s stalls outfitted for easy toilet paper passing’ or something like that.”

Six

Campgrounds, Catholics & Curses

Campgrounds practiced strange traditions like cramming all the holidays into the short camping season, and Lisa had plans to do the same. My enthusiasm for scheduling events for Christmas in July made me wonder if my religious past was rearing its ugly head again. My relationship with God had always increased during the lowest points in my life, like whenever I was nursing a breakup, or retching over a toilet. I was a foul-weather Catholic.

I wasn’t religious in the homosexuals-are-going-to-hell way, of course. I was more the if-you-steal-something-you-will-pay-for-it-tenfold way. Lisa, Vince, and I all had a similar lack of enthusiasm for religion, amplified by our aunts and uncles, who were old school Italians and reveled in all Roman Catholic traditions. Lisa said once, “You know you were raised by a bunch of fucking Italians when a candle promises a scent of Christmas Eve, and you expect it to smell like fish.”

It was one of the many oddities that differed us from our peers. You grow up figuring that everyone does the seven fishes thing on Christmas Eve, sitting around a table eating struffoli and torrone and never daring to eat meat until after midnight. We thought all kids knew the secret of how to lift the Malocci curse, which could be passed along only by the eldest male relative, and only on Christmas Eve. The Malocci is a headache curse caused by someone who is thinking ill thoughts of you, and the curse is lifted by saying a special prayer while running oil down a finger into a bowl of water. Throughout the year, if there is no elderly relative handy, an Italian horn may ward away this curse in a pinch. The blood red horn, usually
plastic with a gold crown on the thick end of it, also plastic, was easily found in heavily populated Italian neighborhoods. Gas station convenience stores often had them near the front counter with the Life Savers. As kids we were not swayed by the cheapness of this item. We believed it had special powers because our grandmother wore a small one right alongside her crucifix and her gold Number 13 necklace.

I had always prayed when I was scared at night, or when I needed something, but when I was about ten years old, I convinced myself that God talked to me through the trees. I was sure of this, though I never told anyone. Who would I have told? Lisa? (“What the fuck are you? An idiot? I’m not going to have a nut bag for a sister, so knock it the fuck off.”) Vince? He was four years younger than me, and easily spooked, so I would have given him nightmares about birch trees. I couldn’t have told my mother, who was only half Italian, and whose concept of anything mystical or religious was for people who had far more free time than she had.

Mom may have been right, since religion came to me for the first time when I was painfully bored. I was in the backyard trying to lay low from Mom, who could hone in on my boredom like a professional bass fisherman, even if I was hiding under the couch like a perch under a sunken log. She would go trolling the house and throw her hook below the couch, then inform me that she needed a hand with the laundry since I was just wasting time. When the weather was good, it was easier to hide my boredom from her, since most of Mom’s chores were indoors.

On this particular day I was laying low outside and I remember it was cold and windy, since I was fantasizing about what it would be like to have been born by a mom who was OK with children hanging around the house during a nice day, watching more than three hours of TV. I nearly caved and went back inside due to the cold, but Sundays were floor-washing day and I didn’t want to get roped into moving kitchen chairs. Plus, washing floors made Mom particularly grumpy. Lisa always said she was grumpy because none of us had yet mastered the art of floating, and she could not accept the impossibility of three children’s feet not touching a floor for a solid hour.

On that day, I did what I always did when I was bored outside; I went across the street into the only entrance to a small patch of woods. I felt lucky we had these woods. It was the only one in the neighborhood and all the kids would have to walk by our house to get to it, and we had it right across the street. This was a safer option than moping around the backyard, where Mom might spot me out the kitchen window.

I watched the wind kick up the leaves into a dance and thought of a game where I asked the trees Yes or No questions. If the trees stayed silent, then the answer was No. If the wind picked up and made them wave, then the answer was Yes. A poor kid’s Magic 8 Ball. At first I asked questions that were silly, like, Would I be rich some day. (The trees said yes—and they turned out to be right.) Then I started to ask questions that I already knew the answer to, to test the unsuspecting trees. (Is my house white? Does Danny Gallagher from my English class have a pimple face, etc.) After the trees had answered eight in a row correctly, I got the eerie feeling that I was not just playing a game. I stopped asking questions and the trees stopped too. I remember sitting in the woods for a long time, until the silence got spookier than playing the game. So, I did what I always did when I was scared (and only when I was scared):I talked to God.

“God?”

Just then, the wind picked up the biggest gust yet and swayed the trees back and forth as if they were enthusiastically, or insanely, nodding their heads and the breeze pelted against my widened eyes. ‘Yes, of course it’s me!’ they seemed to be saying.

When the wind died down, I asked softly again, “Really? It’s you?” And the wind picked up again, in a rage this time, twisting the trees until they bent in impossible ways, seemingly that only something made of rubber could do. The wind kicked up and up, and when I didn’t think it could kick up some more it kicked up again as if all the trees wanted to show me how silly I was to have doubted them.

The leaves were vibrating so fast and furiously that they sparkled like a body of water, cresting in waves that built and fell, then built again. I thought I heard music, I thought I couldn’t breath, I definitely couldn’t move. I thought I had found God.

I told nobody.

My superstitious mind told me I should not mess with powers like this, and quizzing God could get me in a shitload of trouble, like playing with a Ouija board, so I didn’t talk to the trees for a long time after that. But, as the intensity of that first day faded, I began to talk to them again, and this habit followed me into adulthood so gradually that I never had time to analyze if it was a dumb thing to do. I just did it. I still did it—and I still told nobody.

And now I was spending time in a campground, and today I did it instinctively on my walk back through the camp after Lisa shared some news. “She’s coming,” Lisa had said.

“Who’s coming?” I asked.

“Erica. She is taking the job as our contractor.”

“You’re shitting me. Does Vince know?”

Lisa said, “Not shitting you. You should tell him.”

“Hell no! Your idea, you do it.”

“You want them back together, too, and you’re much closer to Erica. You tell him. It’s a good sign that she agreed to come,” Lisa said.

Was it a good sign? I silently asked the row of trees looming behind my sister.

Immediately, the wind whipped through the campground, pulling the pines into a frenzied dance on the horizon. Maybe it was.

“Where the fuck did this wind come from?” Lisa said, “It’s been still all day.”

The trees seemed to be dancing an enthusiastic “Yes!” celebration. Or maybe they were flailing their limbs to warn us about a horrible mistake Lisa had made. Good sign or not, I realized selfishly that I wanted Erica to come. I had missed her, and missing a person like Erica was not the easiest thing to do. To the world, Erica was not the warm and fuzzy type; she was more like the cold and prickly. But toward me she was cool and neutral, and I was flattered by it, since this was Erica’s version of warmth. My brother liked this about her too. When Vince first met her, he had interpreted her tossing a few barbed comments his way as a sign that she might like him, and he’d turned out to be right.

I wrangled a job out of Erica and used my new fortune to pay
for a distraction. What I had bought myself was a job with a talented and overbearing boss. Over time, I had noticed her critical assessments about my work had slowed to an occasional snide comment, and, with Erica, this was probably the only evidence I would ever have that we had become good friends. No criticism was like someone else saying “Good work!” and I understood the gruffness of her. I was Lisa’s sister, after all.