Eating My Feelings (6 page)

“What the hell is
Clueless
?” my father asked.

“Only the most amazing movie ever made,” I replied as I rolled my eyes. Didn’t he know these things? Had he been living under a rock?

“Is that like
Clue
?” he asked. Another incredible film, but not what I was going for at that point.

“As if!” I replied.

“As if what?”

“Jesus! I will find it at the store and you can buy it,” I continued. “I also need a bottle of cologne from
Melrose Place
.”

“Melrose Place in L.A.?”

“No, the television show, duh!”

“The television show
Melrose Place
has its own cologne line? When did that happen?”

“When do any amazing things happen? They just happen, Dad, it’s life.”

“I don’t know about any of this,” my father said. “You’ve changed.”

Considering the previous year he had purchased a signed poster from the Broadway show
Guys and Dolls
for me as a Hanukah present, these gift demands seemed about on par with what my interests had been up to that point.

“Okay, I guess I can get these things for you,” he said. “But don’t you want a new baseball cap or something?”

“Uh, sounds nice, but that doesn’t really go with the motif of my winter/spring ninety-six collection,” I replied.

“Motif?” he asked.

“Yes, it’s going to be a new and improved me in 1996!”

“Does that new and improved you mean that you are going to change your eating habits?”

“Nope. Everything in that department stays the same. But I need a new look, don’t you think?” I had been rocking my older brother’s worn-out fraternity T-shirts. Any look besides that was going to be an improvement. Around then my asshole stepmother entered the room. She was probably smoking a cigarette or yelling at someone on the phone or something. I may seem as if I am taking some artistic liberties when describing her, but she is truly an evil and horrible person. But at that juncture in our relationship her depravity was just beginning to blossom.

“I overheard your conversation,” she said in my general direction. “Were those boys you were hanging out with at camp gay?”

“Don’t talk to me,” I replied. I attempted to converse with the woman as little as possible, but my father was probably trying to get some that night so he said, “Answer your stepmother.”

“I don’t fucking know,” I replied.

“LANGUAGE!” my father yelled.

“Listen lady, I am twelve. I think it’s a bit early to be making generalizations about my peers’ sexuality at such a tender age.”

They both just looked at me. I was
such
a smart-ass, neither one of them ever knew what to do with me. My stepmother looked at me and in her eyes I saw the venom of a thousand poisonous snakes. She had her idea of what boys should and shouldn’t be doing. I believe that was when she hatched her plan to destroy me once and for all.

The rest of the school year went off effortlessly. The highlight was being cast in the school production of
The Music Man
.
It was an amazing event, which in my mind was to lead up to my monumental return to Stagedoor, a better performer, but still as fat as ever. I could pull off Tony—they had no idea what they were in for. I had taken every dance class and singing lesson I could afford and was going to rock the auditions that summer. In May I went to my father’s house to fill out what I thought were forms for the classes I wanted to take at Stagedoor that summer. I was so excited to be returning to the camp where I felt I could be myself. I had mailed Jesse a letter earlier that week telling him how fabulous camp was going to be that summer and that I secretly hoped we would go to second, which wasn’t much of a secret if I told him about it. However, he had just bleached his hair, and I wasn’t sure how I was going to feel about his new look. When my dad and stepmother put the paperwork in front of me, I noticed the letterhead read Hidden Crest and not Stagedoor.

“What the hell is this?” I asked.

“Your stepmother and I felt that it was time for you try a different camp,” my father said.

“Oh really?” I replied. “Wasn’t it her idea to send me to Stagedoor in the first place?” It was. However, the only reason that she sent me to camp was because it got my little brother and me out of the house during part of the summer, although Kevin went to an all-boys sports camp in Maine and I sashayed off to Stagedoor. Those were the months the court said we were supposed to be spending with my father. She did not want us around; therefore, she did it to benefit herself.

“Yes it was,” the evil whore said. “But now I—I mean we—think it’s best for you to move on. The boys at your old camp were a little—”

“Different,” my father interrupted. “They were a little different.
We think it’s time for you to be around other boys your age and … well … play sports.”

“Seriously?” I asked.

“Yes,” my father replied. “It will be wonderful. It’s a basketball camp. An all-boys basketball camp.”

Words such as
basketball
were not in my vocabulary. My father gave a pantomime demo on what the sport involved and I wanted no part of it.

“You did this!” I screamed at my stepmother, “and you will pay!” I said as I ran out of the room. Earlier that year, Blair had pushed Téa out of a window on
One Life to Live
. I hoped that life was about to imitate art in my house. All I needed to do was find a big window and throw that bitch out of it. I’d try to get off on a technicality, like temporary insanity. I was only twelve, but I was willing to risk it, and knew with the right amount of makeup and a good old-fashioned crooked lawyer, I would probably be able to.

“WHAT THE FUCK?” my mother yelled into the phone the next day. “Mark loved that theater camp, and you are sending him to … basketball camp? Really?”

My mother, forever my champion, was livid that my father had switched things up behind her back. She realized that I belonged at Stagedoor and that a chimpanzee would have fared better at a basketball camp than me. I sat there and watched my mother go off on my father over the phone. As I listened to their conversation, I began to wonder if there was something really wrong with me. There must have been if my father and evil stepmother would go to such great lengths to literally turn my life upside down. It wasn’t until later in life that I realized, I had it right all along.

“Well,” my mother said as she hung up the phone, “it looks like you’re screwed.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Your asshole of a father put down a fifteen-thousand-dollar, nonrefundable deposit on the camp, so you have to go or he is out a ton of money.”

“I have to?”

“You should go,” she said. “He’s an asshole, but that’s a lot of money and he wants to help you … I think.” It seemed as though we were both confused as to whom this camp was actually helping.

“Okay, but if he wants to help me and thinks I am gay, why in the world would he send me to an all-boys camp?”

“He’s an idiot. Plain and simple.”

“I don’t know anything about this camp. I don’t even know where it is,” I said.

“It’s outside of Boston. In New Hampshire.”

“New Hamp … shire?” This state was clearly not on my radar.

“Yes, New Hampshire. It’s only a month, Mark. Maybe it will be fun.”

“Well, Mother,” I said, “we all thought that Kimberly blowing up Melrose Place was going to be fun and look at what a mess that turned out to be!”

It turns out, there are places worse than D.C. after all. Hidden Crest, New Hampshire, for example, is one of them. Located near Dartmouth College, Hidden Crest is a quaint and dreary lakeside town where the devil and his children set up shop and called it a summer camp. As my father and stepmother dropped me off in this fresh hell, I finally mustered up the courage to use a word that I had been waiting to drop at just the right occasion.

“CUNT!” I yelled at my stepmother.

“MARK!” my father yelled.

“That’s what she is. She is a cunt. And the worst part is, she knows it.”

My stepmother just stood there and smiled at me. She was probably thinking about how she was going to poison my father, get away with it, and steal all of his money while I was gone at camp.

“I HATE YOU!” I yelled at my father. “But I hate her more!”

“Why me?” the devil whisperer questioned.

“BECAUSE THIS WAS ALL YOUR IDEA!” I yelled at the top of my lungs. Other parents dropping their children off began to casually eavesdrop on our conversation as they sent their children on their way. I continued at foghorn level: “I’m not even your son; I don’t know why you even care. Why can’t you just let me do what I want to do? I wasn’t hurting anyone.”

“Because you are not acting how a boy is supposed to act,” she replied.

“Oh, and you know so much about how boys are supposed to act, don’t you?” I said. “You don’t even know how women your own age are supposed to act. Someone who drinks as much, smokes as much, and takes as many pills as you do should not be telling anyone how to act!” Had I been about ten years older, the two of us would have most likely been the best of friends due to her bad habits. She’s pretty much everything I look for in a friend in adulthood, but at twelve, I hated her.

“YOU’RE SUCH A BRAT!” my stepmother yelled.

“Oh yeah?” I said. “I may be a brat, BUT YOU’RE STILL A CUNT!” I was so incredibly loud that everyone around us stopped dead in their tracks. Had this been a cartoon, an elderly woman would have said, “My word,” as her monocle dropped
into her champagne glass. I wondered where the hell Kimberly was. Couldn’t she have blown up my stepmother instead of my beloved Heather Locklear?

“Hello,” a man said as he came up behind me.

“HOLY SHIT!” I yelled. He scared me. He came at me like the Flash, but when I turned around a small, sixty-something-year-old man was standing there, wearing a Polo shirt with a monogrammed H on it. I was hoping the H stood for
Hello, Dolly!
, a production that was possibly in the works for later in the summer, but much to my chagrin, it stood for Hidden Crest. I turned around again to see what my father and stepmother were up to, but when I looked behind me all I saw was a cloud of smoke. They had driven away so quickly and without a proper good-bye that I felt abandoned. Kind of like how Dumpster prom babies must feel.

“Welcome to Hidden Crest,” the man said. “You must be Mark. I’m Carl. I hear you are not very happy to be here?”

“What tipped you off? The fact that I just called my stepmother a cunt or the fact that I am currently planning an escape route in my head right now?”

“Oh, there is no escaping Hidden Crest, my friend,” Carl said eerily. “There isn’t a town around here for miles. You’ll be walking a mighty long time to find anyone to help you.”

“I’ll find a way—just you wait.” Clearly my smart-ass shenanigans were not going to fly here. If I was going to escape, I was going to have to befriend everyone, then turn on them.

“Let me show you around,” Carl said. The first stop was the cafeteria, a place I hoped to be spending a majority of the summer.

The camp owner showed me around the cafeteria as he chatted about the food.

“It’s all very healthy for you. Everything is cooked to order. Lean meats, vegetables, everything a caveman would have eaten. No pastas, no starches, etcetera.”

He was omitting the best parts. “Wait … What?” I asked. “What kind of desserts do you serve? Pineapple upside-down cake? Funfetti cake? Cupcakes? Some form of cake, please, God, tell me you have cake!”

“No cakes here. We serve fruit for dessert.”

I had officially entered Nazi Germany. Stagedoor always offered cake for dessert. None of the eating-disorders-to-be ever partook in such offerings, but I always ate whatever they didn’t want.

“What the hell kind of operation are you running here?”

“It’s a healthy camp for boys,” Carl said.

“Is it …?” I couldn’t bear to say the words myself, “… a …”

“It’s not a fat camp,” he said.

“FAT CAMP? Oh my God!” I put my hands to my face and began to weep. My all-time favorite movie as a child was
Heavyweights
, a movie about fat kids who were sent to Camp Hope to lose weight. You know that feeling you get the moment you realize something is hilarious until it’s actually happening to you? Like when you’re watching
Weekend at Bernie’s
and you’re thinking:
Wow, this movie is hilarious! I wish I was spending every weekend with Bernie
. However, if you had to cart a dead guy around for an entire weekend while pretending he was alive it would be not only not funny but gross, exhausting, and illegal. That was my moment.

The difference between this camp and the camp from
Heavyweights
was that there were very few fat people at this camp. A majority of the campers were returnees who wanted to keep their weight off. The owner of the camp sent me off
to my cabin, where I promptly put the
Clueless
soundtrack into my portable CD player and began reading from cover to cover the
Soap Opera Digest
I had bought at the airport. I was about to miss my stories for a full month. I had to make sure there was something, anything, to keep me connected to what was going on.

I slept for about two days until someone had the nerve to wake me up.

“Hello,” a kid yelled as he poked me with a stick. “Hello, it’s Jeremy. Your bunkmate. It’s time to wake up. You’ve been sleeping for an awfully long time.”

“OH SHIT!” I yelled.

“What is it?” Jeremy asked.

“It wasn’t a dream. I’m living a nightmare,” I said.

“What are you talking about?” Jeremy asked.

“I thought my coming to this awful place was a dream, but it turns out it’s not. I am really here,” I said. “I’m supposed to be singing show tunes all summer long, not attempting to lose weight with you, Poindexter.”

“You could stand to lose a few,” Jeremy said as he gave me the once-over.

“Mind your business,” I replied. “It’s bad enough that my idiot father told me this was basketball camp. Now I’m being told it’s a backward-ass fat camp. I’ll tell you what, kid, as this web of lies continues to untangle, it’s very reminiscent of when Michael found out that Sydney was a prostitute on
Melrose Place
. That didn’t end very well, and I’m pretty sure this won’t either.”