camping raze in the four years i'd known her, amanda couldn't have said more than thirty words to me. so when she called me one night that summer and told me she was going camping in wheatley with a few friends and she wanted me to come with her, i was pretty sure i knew what it meant. i called pete and asked to borrow his sleeping bag for the weekend. he said sure. he said there was something great about stripping down to your underwear and feeling the kiss of the silk liner on your skin. amanda came to pick me up in a van on friday. she was sitting in the passenger seat. john was driving. i went to high_school with him, but i never knew him. he was a grade or two ahead of me. he seemed nice. he looked like david sylvian's illegitimate son. i threw pete's sleeping bag in the back along with a plastic shopping bag that had a few shirts, a few granola bars and juice boxes, and a few clean pairs of socks and underwear in it. i sat in the back seat. i watched it get dark through the windshield and listened to jim morrison sing "not to touch the earth". run with me. run with me. run with me. let's run. the girl john said he was going to marry was waiting for us at the campsite. he left her there by herself. she was a small, pretty, frail-looking person in a dark grey hoodie. her blonde hair looked less like it was grown and more like it was stitched into her scalp after the fact. we made a campfire. john cooked up some hotdogs. he showed me a cooler full of booze. there was captain morgan's spiced rum, beer, some wine coolers, hard lemonade, and a huge bottle of homemade long island iced tea. he gave me a swig of that stuff. it tasted like piss. he told me he was drinking so much he didn't get drunk or hungover anymore. he would either puke or he wouldn't puke. sometimes he would black out. sometimes he wouldn't. i told him i'd never blacked out before. he said i was lucky. amanda was proud of the tent. she said she set it up herself. i didn't know how i was going to handle sleeping on the ground. i took pete's advice. i stripped down to my underwear. i felt the cold kiss of the liner against my skin. i slept like a heavy stone. john drove his girlfriend home on saturday. something was wrong with her stomach. it started pouring rain, but the sun never went away. i sat in the tent with amanda to stay dry. i looked at her sitting crosslegged in front of me. i wondered how i was supposed to make a move when i didn't have any moves to make. before i could figure it out, john was back. he had another guy with him. his name was brad. he wore a dark blue baseball cap. he looked like a brad. the four of us played a drinking game to pass the time. we went through the alphabet and took turns trying to name a band that started with whatever letter we landed on. whenever someone couldn't come up with a name, they had to take a swig of whatever they were drinking. everyone else was drinking wine coolers. i drank captain morgan's straight from the bottle. john and amanda thought i was making up band names like gaye bykers on acid and x-ray spex. so i kept taking slugs from the bottle, pretending to lose a game i knew i was winning. after i'd been doing that for a while, john handed me his homemade long island iced piss to drink. it didn't taste like piss anymore. it tasted like heaven. i told him how smooth it was after drinking all that straight spiced rum. he smiled and said, "that was the idea." i told him he was a fucking genius. john and amanda went off to do something together. i stayed in the tent with brad. he told me a story about meeting a woman in a bar and trying to pick her up. she flipped the script and told him she was a swinger. she took him back to her place. he got what he wanted. so did she. her husband watched. the dog watched too. when it stopped raining, we went outside. i was so drunk i almost fell in the creek. the two of us walked to the bathroom. there was an old man in there. he had his dog on a leash. the dog stood there and watched him piss at one of the urinals. "that was pretty fucked up," brad said when we were on our way out. "bringing a dog in the bathroom like that." "there was a dog?" i was looking right at the man and his dog. i saw them. but my brain didn't connect them with the things they were supposed to be. by the time we got back to our campsite i couldn't see anything. someone called my name. it was amanda's friend nancy. she was staying at another campsite. i looked at her and all i saw was the swirl of fading daylight around her blonde head. she had to tell me who she was. "hi john," she said. "hey nancy," i slurred. "i'd say it's good to see you, but i'm so fuckin' drunk i can't see anything right now." "that's okay," she said. i wish i could have seen her. she had a good face. on one of the worst nights of my life, she put her hand on my arm to let me know it was my turn when a joint was going around. i know it really happened because i have it on video. through the thick grain of a second generation vhs tape made digital, there's still something in her eyes that makes me want to cry. i made it back to the tent, and then i couldn't stand up anymore. i didn't think the rum would hit me so hard. i thought i'd lie down until i sobered up a little. i didn't sober up at all. someone tossed me a bottle of water. while everyone else was out there making another campfire, and eating, and drinking, and having a good time, i spent the night in the tent. every once in a while i reached over and unzipped the front so i could throw up. amanda came by to check on me a few times. one time she caught me coughing up half-digested hot dogs and spit. "how are you doing in there?" she asked. "i'm good," i said. "i'm just puking." "you better not be puking in my tent, johnny." "i wouldn't do that to you, amanda. i don't wanna tarnish your tent with my disgust." "that's a good line. you should remember that and put it in a song." i did. and i did. i'd never been so drunk in my life. i was surprised and a little disappointed i didn't black out. when everyone turned in for the night, i saw amanda climb into john's sleeping bag. "your legs are so warm," she whispered. she got on top of him. they fucked. brad was asleep. john and amanda thought i was sleeping too. they were about as quiet as two people fucking can be. i heard them anyway. she didn't want me. she wanted him. i woke up sunday afternoon feeling like wet garbage. i was hungry and thirsty. i grabbed a granola bar and a box of warm fruit punch and walked to the bathroom by myself. i finished my breakfast on the way. i didn't wash my face the whole trip. i felt stupid doing it in the sink of a public bathroom. i brought my concealer with me and did a little precision work when no one was looking, touching up a few pimples i thought i saw starting to come in. twenty minutes later i was standing near the creek and throwing up again. the only thing that came out was red stuff. it was the fruit punch. some of it got on my white henley shirt. "you okay over there?" john asked. "yeah," i said. "better to get it out of the way now." on the drive back to windsor, billy idol was singing on the radio about the little dancer who came dancing to his door the night before. i sang along with him under my breath. then i felt something start to happen in my stomach. it was the granola bar. it came up through my throat and filled my mouth, all warm and thick and awful. i looked around the van for something i could throw up in. a crockpot. a thermos. anything. there was nothing. i couldn't tell john to pull over. i couldn't say anything. i tried to swallow it. that just made it worse. when i couldn't hold it in anymore, i let it happen. i puked up disgusting wet granola bar mess all over my jeans and my shirt. i got some in my hair. i got some on brad's backpack. i got some on the grey carpeted floor of the van. it wasn't one of my finer moments. john asked if i was all right. "yeah," i said. "sorry about that. i tried to get it all on myself so i wouldn't fuck up your van." i sat there with my wet breakfast stinking up my clothes and sang along some more with billy idol. in the midnight hour, she cried more, more, more. with a rebel yell, she cried more, more, more. i wanted to disappear. john dropped brad off at his place. i told him i was sorry for getting some of my puke on his backpack. he told me not to worry about it. when john dropped me off at my house, i handed him twenty bucks for gas and grabbed pete's sleeping bag and the bag that had my dirty clothes in it. the driveway was empty. my dad wasn't home. he was still at his girlfriend's place in leamington. i threw my clothes in the washing machine and filled up the bathtub. my shampoo smelled like john's long island iced piss. it made me gag. i cleaned myself up and washed my face for the first time since friday morning. stupid. stupid. stupid. i threw my wet clothes in the dryer. i sat on my bed and listened to the album i'd just finished making on my cd player with the space sound turned on to exaggerate the stereo field. i skipped ahead to the fourth song and listened to myself sing about wanting to die with holes in my brain. i put on a clean shirt, grabbed my jeans from the dryer, put those on too, tied a bandana around my head, and grabbed a guitar and a harmonica. when my dad pulled into the driveway, i was sitting on the side porch, strumming a d major chord and blowing into the harp, doing a pretty convincing imitation of someone who wasn't an hour removed from stewing in his own vomit. gord came by with mark. he asked if i wanted to shoot some pool with them. i said all right. we ducked into an alley before we walked to nine ball heaven. mark said he ate some shrooms earlier and his buzz was fading. he wanted to smoke a joint. "i don't know," i said. "i don't think i have that much pot left." mark said, "is it just me, or is it cold out here?" it wasn't cold. he was being an asshole. i pulled out a joint. we smoked it. then we played pool and i thought about what a waste of time my weekend camping trip was. i could have just stayed home and puked on myself in my own bed. 220226 ... epitome of incomprehensibility This is masterfully told, the humour and the misery. ... My teenage tutoring student is doing a speech for a contest about how much she hates camping. The humour's in the exaggeration, because it's the small, specific things she pretends to object to, like the type of sandals camping-enthusiastic people wear. She shared the screen and showed me a Google search of exactly the type she meant. The kind my dad wears. Not Birkenstocks exactly - sturdy things with more straps. They seemed perfectly unobjectionable, but maybe that's the point. But she seemed genuinely mad that they existed, like they were some kind of aesthetic affront. 220227 ... kerry echoing e_o_i: so absorbing, beautifully written. (and i have been camping more times than i can even count... i always forget how much i dislike it.) 220301 ... raze (you two ... making me feel all special.) 220301 what's it to you? who go blather from