With the tenacity of pubescence I began to find the life of a teenage communist a hard thing. Were the Beatles right? Would I really not make it with anyone, anyhow? When, one evening, my father showed more interest in defending the suppression of the Krondstadt Rebellion than in the score of my soccer game, even when I’d been prepared to lie that I’d scored the winning goal, I quietly decided enough’s enough. Behind my bedroom door, under the ferrous gaze of Che, I called Mom and told her I was interested in her church’s summer youth retreat. Her jaw must have hung slack and dumb at the news, as though she were about to receive the body and the blood.
“You’re not having me on, are you?”
“No, no. Might be a nice change. For a change.”
“Well then, praise God!” Unintentionally, it seemed I’d answered a prayer. “A boy your age needs some fun. Not to mention food and fellowship.” She giggled, nearly hysterical. “The three f’s!”
Hanging up I turned on the radio, switching the band from short wave to AM, dialling away from Radio Tiraña and tuning into CHUM’s Top 30. I pulled something by Isaac Asimov out from beneath a collection of Mao’s poetry, stretched back upon the bed and fell asleep to Paul McCartney and Wings.
Why doncha listen t’what the man said?
2
The Cliffside Baptist youth retreated to 100 acres of Muskoka scrub 90 miles north of the city; an investment property of a Hong Kong émigré who’d given his life to Christ in a recent “I Found It!” campaign. There were four counsellors and two dozen campers: mostly God bullies who wore Jesus, the Real Thing t-shirts and rattled off the names of born again athletes as though introducing the home team’s starting line for the Judgement Bowl. One or two others were my friends, and a few more near-friends, who agreed that, like the swarming black flies and our peeling noses, fellowship was a nuisance tag-along to the fun and food.
Our tents were pitched on a narrow, weedy carpet between shallow Lake Oompah and an outhouse that had the barbed reek of thriving faecal coliform. The boys preferred, like boys of most faiths might, to disappear into the bush to piss on the dogwood and wipe their asses with handfuls of mature maple leaves. The few girls held their noses and voided their bowels with fearsome modesty.
Up the road half a mile there was a field cleared for us. Most afternoons and evenings, between Bible Study and campfire singsperation, we’d be there, playing interminable games of Softball. The preaching didn’t convince me God was good, but so long as He let me hang out in the outfield with Patti Hula I didn’t mind him overmuch. Christ and Marx could have been a law firm from the end of the world for all I cared: from that unnumbered inning when we split a pack of banana-flavoured Bubble Yum, Patti was my Alpha and Omega. She was a year older and almost a foot shorter than me, with shoulder-length hair as red and rich as a Saviour’s blood. Her breasts were small — half a mouthful, I imagined. She was handsome, not beautiful, and then only just; but she hooked me with her loopy grin out there near the ragweed and gopher holes. More than once I shouted “It’s yours!” just to watch her trifling nipples poke at her sweaty-T as she stretched to catch a pop fly.
Patti came from what was politely called an “unchurched” family, and didn’t know Eve from Adam. She’d been invited by her friend Marinda Learner, who undoubtedly was hoping for an easy conversion and another crown across the Jordan. It didn’t look good for Marinda. The Word of the Lord neither hardened Patti’s heart as it had the pharaoh’s nor melted it like Simon Peter’s. She was curious, certainly, and listened with considered attention to the stories from the life of Elisha, though she would do the same for snippets from any unfamiliar heroic fantasy. Hobbits and prophets, Christ and Frodo, magic rings and resurrections from the dead — she absorbed it all, but that she was expected to accept Jesus into her heart left no sensible impression.
Every night I’d strategize to plant a big wet one, or even a hard one, on Patti Hula. She wore a roomy vinyl poncho in foul weather, almost big enough for two, so maybe I could say, “Got a hand under there I can hold on to?” Maybe not. If it were hot and there were no counsellors in sight, I could offer to massage oil into her shoulders while she lay by the shore with her eyes closed and her lips slightly parted. If it were hot… The thought of sweat pooling in the small of Pattis back while I kneaded her freckled flesh reminded my hand of a rhythm never far from my mind.
Coward that I am, we didn’t touch until the final campfire.
Our evening conflagrations were set on the lip of a cliff almost a mile from the lake: a Precambrian wall 60 feet high, poking through the mossy earth like an old shark’s tooth. Though the cliff stood at right angle to the world, along the winding footpath from the shore and our tents, the slope barely registered. The clearing was a dirty circle of ragweed 80 feet across, proscribed by adolescent spruce and a licorice night sky. There was a sickly-looking bush half over the cliff’s edge next to which, once the girls had retired to their tents, some male counsellors would stage urination contests, not noticing the dirt they pissed out of it’s arthritic grasp.
Pastor Filmore was to arrive our last night in order to deliver the closer: our final campfire message. It would stink of sulphur and Christian gore, full of lf-you-should-die-tonight logic, crafted to literally scare the hell out of us, and the bejeezus into us.
“Last year out at Burke’s Falls all that Lake of Fire stuff terrified me so much I nearly got born again and again and again,” Terry MacRury told me after breakfast on the morning of our last full day. “It’s not like his sermons back home. Here he really let’s it all hang out.”
Filmore had been scaring kids shitless for ten years’ worth of these retreats, almost all of them held on the sprawling grounds of a well-appointed evangelical camp outside Elmdale. But rents were up and collections were down, and for a time it was feared the Cliffside retreat would be downsized to an evening of nanaimo bars and gospel records in the church auditorium. Filmore, I was told, thanked God frequently in his sermons for providing the property through the charity of a recent convert, though he’d visited the site only once.
We’d expected him to arrive in time to share our evening chili and Tang, but when the last spoon of Laura Secord butterscotch pudding was licked clean and he hadn’t shown, camp leader Drew Tallboys called the other counsellors aside for a whispered huddle. I sidled up to Patti, who was waiting with Marinda for a pair of dragonflies to leave their mosquito net so they could grab some snacks and flashlights for the campfire.
Sarcasm sloshing everywhere, I muttered, “Gee, I sure hope he isn’t lost.”
“Say it ain’t so,” Patti smiled. She wouldn’t mind either way, but it was nice to hear her play along. Marinda frowned and sighed heavily. Then she knelt down, plucked a half-buried stone and tossed it at their tent flap. One dragonfly buzzed towards the lake, the second towards a weaving, screaming Marinda.
Five minutes later, after a brief prayer, the huddle broke. Tallboys announced that Curtis Drieger — coincidentally, winner of the previous night’s pissing contest — would remain at lakeside to await Filmore’s unmistakable burgundy Buick LeSabre. The rest of us would accompany Tallboys and two other counsellors up the footpath to the cliff for our campfire.
The first 30 minutes each evening we humiliated ourselves for Christ’s sake with nonsense songs. I preferred Yano Leimerman’s lesson on Paul’s use of the aorist imperative in Ephesians 6:13 to one more chorus of “Rocco Ate My Taco.” Singing was bad enough. The broad, spastic gestures by the light of a gibbous moon made it unbearable.
These were not selections from the Baptist hymnody — they came later — and there wasn’t even one vague allusion among them to the propitiatory work of our Saviour. “Rocco Ate Mt Taco” could just as easily be sung by an assembly of abjuring Shinto youth, or a pimply gang of pointy-eared Trekkie conventioneers while awaiting a celebrity Q & A with George Takei. We were a mandala of mock flagellants and nutty