Papa Don't Preach

Summer of 1986. I was beginning to stew in a broth of pre-teen hormones, growing conflict with my mother, and a miasma of self-hatred and anxiety over my grades. Eighth grade was looming, and both my parents—Dad from over the phone—were putting pressure on me now that high school was imminent on the horizon.

“Your grades will start to matter now,” my mother pressed. “This is your last year to loaf and space out in school. Pretty soon you’ll have to start thinking about college, and you can’t just fart around anymore.” Dad rumbled the same ominous warnings. I was so used to his stern, reproachful voice over the phone that I began to perfect my forty-yard stare even before my mother handed me the receiver. He’d talk to me as if addressing a business colleague.

“Y’know,” he’d say in his faint, toasted-caramel Texan drawl, “you only get one chance to impress these people.” And I’d stare fixedly at some point past the walls of the house, playing tricks with my eyes to see how long I could go without blinking. By “these people” he meant college recruiters, who were still five years away if I was counting right, which I probably wasn’t. I was still having trouble learning how to tell time on a clock with hands, let alone add numbers in my head without the aid of paper and pencil. I was hopeless at multiplication and long division. Now I was to learn pre-algebra. My parents might as well have bidden me to fly to the moon without a spaceship.

But I still had the summer, a precious buffer between me and school. In early June I went to see Dad, Carol and the girls in California. But this summer was different. Dad had to work all the time, and Carol had her hands full with Patricia and Barbara, so I found out I was going to go to “summer camp.” It was just a day camp, Dad said, not all night like the Jesus camp I’d been to back home. Still, it worried me. I didn’t want to “make new friends,” and I didn’t want to be away from my family. But that was how it was going to be. Dad talked his way around my obstinacy, saying my sisters would be in daycare part-time, and it was pretty much the same thing. I reared back at that. Daycare.

In the end there wasn’t much choice though. The real clincher was that the camp had horses, and that’s how he got me on board. I knew right away I was out of my element. That first day, from the instant I got out of the car and shouldered my backpack with snacks in it, and the little teddy bear that I had snuck along for comfort, I was the odd one out. All these bigger boys were milling around, high-fiving each other and cussing each other out and making a running commentary about the girls. I looked around for Nameless, but he’d begun to fade by then. All I saw was a faint red shimmer hanging just above the grass. He would be no help to me here.

“Timmy, you fat fucker, what you been doing, eating your mom’s cherry pie all year?” “Hey Chris, how’s your skank girlfriend?” “Look at those hotties, what are they, from Malibu or some shit? Like to break them in right.” I made my way over to where there seemed to be the most girls, and shyly stood wrapping my legs around one another, which was becoming my new habit now that they were so long; I was growing by the day, it seemed. My goal was to be noticed as little as possible, but this was folly. One of the girls turned and saw me, and immediately grabbed her friend and pointed.

“Hey!” she sneered, “check her out! She looks like a ghost!” Then, to me, “Hey Casper!” Aw crap, I thought to myself. It was only a matter of time. My skin marked me as an outsider among the golden-hued, blonde-streaked children of the California sun. I was so white I practically didn’t cast a shadow. By now everyone nearby had turned to look, and I was causing an uproar.

Rescue came in the form of a camp counselor. His name was Andy, and he herded all the kids toward the group area, where we sat on benches for the introduction and welcome to camp. Other counselors appeared, and the games began. These were supposed to be bonding games, but in truth we were like a bunch of dogs sniffing each other’s butts and deciding if we’d be friend or foe. I knew the gig; I’d been a kid for a few years now but I’d been a canine for even longer. I determined right then that I wasn’t going to let these girls, these popular, rich, tanned, cotton-candy-headed girls, get the upper hand on me. They knew things I didn’t, but I’d already figured out their type and I raised my hackles in contempt. They didn’t like to get dirty, they liked gossip and painting their nails and putting on makeup. Camp wasn’t about that; camp was about winning at the things I was good at. I would roll them in the dust.

But first I had to get around the group dynamic. They were dialed in to American culture in a way I wasn’t. In Alaska I didn’t have access to the latest styles, the newest pop albums, the makeup and hair trends, the clothing and magazines that these LA girls were being raised on. I didn’t have a TV, didn’t even have a tan for godsakes. They couldn’t believe it. They wanted to know where I’d been. Chrissy, the most super-popular of the little in-crowd, cornered me on the bus the second day of camp, on our way to go swimming.

“So what’s your deal?” she said, snapping her Juicy Fruit. “You been locked in the attic for, like, your whole life? Your mom keep you locked up there with your brother? Kinky.” She stared at me out of glazed eyes, masked with electric-blue liner, and the other girls snickered and waited for my reply like a bunch of glossy crows, bright and hard. I was surprised she read at all, let alone a book like Flowers in the Attic, which I’d palmed on the sly from a neighborhood kid.

“Nah,” I said. “Cool book though. My brother’s not that hot.” I stared back at her for a second, then laughed. “Just kidding. I’m from Alaska, you’ve heard of it, right? We go for months without any sunlight up there.” Chrissy’s eyes widened and she went from jaded bad-girl to fascinated kid. “No. Way. You’re from Alaska? Do you, like, live in a real house? Do you have electricity?” The other girls burst in. “Yeah, do you see polar bears and stuff? Do you have a car? How much snow do you have up there? Is it cold all year?” I saw my chance at fame and used it shamelessly to launch my reputation as badass and freak.

“Yeah, it snows all the time,” I said. “No, I don’t have sled-dogs, but all my neighbors do. My dog is part wolf.” She wasn’t, of course, but she looked like one so I embellished. None of my neighbors had sled-dogs, but I created a world for them where everyone got around by sled, avoided near death by polar bear, and lived in igloos. I said we had so much snow that it piled up over my head (which was true) and that people regularly got lost in it and disappeared and were never heard from again (which was also true, but not where I lived). By the time we got to the swimming pool, they were so fascinated with me that they didn’t even laugh when I stripped down to my bathing suit and revealed thighs so white they nearly blinded the lifeguard.

In the days to follow, though, I began to lose my edge. My exotic appeal faded in favor of Madonna’s new album, True Blue. Chrissy was the first to show up with it in her Walkman, bouncing across the green one morning with her headphones blasting “Papa Don’t Preach.” Andy, our counselor, bossed and teased her till she gave him the tape and he stuck it in the van’s tape deck, where it scandalized my ears as he drove us down the freeway for a hike. I was gobsmacked. I’d never heard of Madonna. I was still listening to U2, Fleetwood Mac, Barbra Streisand and of course Mozart and Beethoven and Chopin. But Madonna—and the things she was singing about—sent me to a new place. A rebellious place. “Papa don’t preach,” indeed. I had no idea the song was about not getting an abortion; I thought the lyric “I’m keepin’ my baby” referred to a girl dating whomever she pleased. Like “baby” was what she called her guy. I couldn’t imagine a girl being pregnant and wanting to keep it; I had recurring nightmares that I had somehow, like the Virgin Mary, become pregnant without ever having done the nasty, and showed up to school with a giant round belly. I would wake from these nightmares sweating, heart racing, into the sweet relief of reality: I was just a kid still, my first kiss years away.

Papa Don’t Preach hit me in a different place. It stirred up a minor rebellion in my brain, started chipping away at the admiration and hopeless love I bore for my father. I’d always sought his attention, bartered unsuccessfully for more of his time. Now, banished to day camp, I found a replacement for his distant affection.

Her name was Carolein. She was Andy’s female counterpart, and the moment I saw her I fell headlong in love. I could not resist. Her eyes sparkled swimming-pool blue, and when she laughed she threw her head back and let them close, wrinkling her nose.  She was tall, with long, smooth legs, and carried herself easily, like a dancing horse. I knew immediately that I would and could do anything, absolutely anything, to make her love me back. I began by resolving to be the fastest, smartest, toughest girl in the bunch, the one who never complained and always won every game.
This love held echoes of all my future loves: I would make myself needed and necessary, so that the person would have to conclude, ultimately, that he or she could not survive without me. It rarely occurred to me whether said person was the right one for me: I would be the right one, nay, the indispensable one, for them.

Almost every activity we did was outdoors, and my favorite was the obstacle course. The camp counselors all got together and broke us down into teams. Andy picked me for his team, and for once Jesus blessed me: Carolein was his partner. We all loaded into the van and packed our sweaty bodies into the timeless hierarchy of kids on wheeled vehicles everywhere: cool kids in back, losers in front. I was near the front, where Carolein lounged next to Andy in the passenger’s seat.  I nearly died of joy. I sat as close to her as I could get, without actually having to talk to her. I hadn’t worked my way up to that yet; I was still just at the creepy staring stage. I watched her profile and tried to mimic the easy way she laughed, the wrinkle of her nose, the glint in her aquamarine eyes. She wasn’t a cute bunny-rabbit of a girl, she wasn’t fake. She seemed to watch life carefully, as if whatever it gave her, she could take or leave, no problem. I wanted this for myself, this seeming lack of need. I needed everything, needed more love, more affection, more time; I felt an insurmountable wall between myself and the rest of humanity. Carolein blended. I wanted to blend.

When we arrived at the obstacle course, I was thrilled to see that it looked almost difficult. There was a part where you had to run through tires without tripping, a bunch of webbing to climb, and a tunnel to crawl through at top speed. The boys started making bets on which one of them was going to win, while the girls, Chrissy being the loudest, started to whine about getting dirty, breaking a nail, and messing up their hair. I sized up Chrissy’s hair and figured nothing could mess up the tower of Aussie Sprunch Spray that sat atop her head, but I kept my trap shut.

We went through in threes and fours, each of us racing against a few other kids from the other teams. I snuck a look at Carolein; she was standing easily inside her tawny skin, chewing Juicy Fruit and chatting with Andy. Every now and then she’d cheer for a kid, but she was only halfway paying attention. I was going to make her notice. When my turn came, I broke for the tires and bounded through them fast as all hell. It was win or die for me. I scrambled up the netting like a ship’s rat, hoisted a leg over the beam at the top, and eased down the other side. Then it was the log crossing; this was the hardest for me, since my center of gravity had left me during my growth spurt the previous year, to hover somewhere just outside of my body. I did it without falling, though, and then dove to my knees and elbows to crawl through the tunnel. Grit singed my eyelids and caked my nostrils; the skin of my knees went raw, and my t-shirt bore scuffs and smudges. But I was first out of the tunnel. I rose to my feet and sprinted the final yards to the finish line while the rest of the team cheered.

Music. That’s what I heard. The sound of her voice, yelling my name. Her white-blonde hair waving like a flag as she did a little jump, clapping for me. For me. I practically pranced my way down the line of my teammates, taking high-fives from the few who offered them. It wasn’t really that big of a deal to Chrissy and her pals; I was dirty, sans makeup, with no fashion sense; I was basically one step down the totem pole from an ugly boy. But it didn’t matter. When I got to the end of the line, she was there waiting, and for the first time she looked right at me, her eyes meeting mine, two bits of winter-fresh and smiling sky. She reached out and gave me a sideways hug, pulling me into her. I fit just under her armpit, a gangly half-grown horse suddenly bathed in the camaraderie of womanhood, my stubborn plank of a body bumping into her lean, easy curves. I saw a flash of my future, a little glimmer that got into my brain and stuck there for when I would need it.

At home that night while she fixed up some martinis, Carol asked about my adventures, and particularly my dirty clothes. I told her all about the obstacle course and how great I’d been. I told her about Madonna, and that I was cool because I was from Alaska.

“That’s lovely, darling!” she said distractedly, and I sensed her relief that I was making some friends.  I even told her about Carolein, but only in relation to Andy— “our two awesome camp counselors”—carefully keeping my heart out of my throat and looking down at my lap when I felt my cheeks begin to glow. I kept her mostly for myself, things which would not even be written down when I scrawled in my faithful journal every night. They were for memory only. Cool clear eyes, my name in her mouth, my future self standing confident and tall and lean, owning my own skin, laughing my own laughter, thinking my own thoughts.