Jewish summer camp was fun as a kid, but as an adult it was like overdosing on nostalgia, taking the things that made life so enjoyable back then, in the only free time on offer, and exploding out its most playful elements – sports, friends, and girls, a holy (secular) trinity. Kal drove up early on the Friday morning of the planned weekend, which didn’t formally start until 2 pm, when attendees would arrive by the car-ful, most pooling together from the city. As a high school buddy of Abie’s without a full-time job, Kal had a sweet deal: get there early to help with registration and avoid paying the $235 everyone else kicked in for a shared bunk ($375 for a private cabin, $150 to pitch your own tent).
It was the third year of the Summer Summit, which started in the height of the pandemic as an excuse for Abie Taub, social organizing savant, to bring together a broad circle of camp-lovers (friends and friends of friends) in a location open-aired enough to render facemasks a fever dream. The first Summit boasted 72 attendees, last year got 99, and this year, according to the check-in list Abie handed Kal at the gate at the end of a long road through the woods, 144 people were expected. After claiming a remote bunk for himself, Jordan, and their friends, Kal set up with a spreadsheet and a map of the campgrounds. There was a rec hall for music, a mess hall for food, a tent for perpetual snacks and alcohol, the lakefront for sunning and swimming, and a U-shaped row of cabins, all named for animals you would never encounter in the Adirondacks. For a few hours, he watched the lot fill with cars and checked in rosy-cheeked eager-eyed young Jews (not exclusively but mostly), many whom he recognized from the last two years, all brimming with enthusiasm and anticipation for a weekend of turned-up countrified celebration.
As a writer, Kal was not tethered to a desk or an office (or, too often, a paycheck), and could therefore futz around at length on an average Friday in early September. He worked check-in until 7:30, at which point people were lit all over – lounging in the pool, snacking in the mess, strumming guitars and beating up bongoes, and just generally soaking in the rangy atmospherics. At 8, Jordan finally called to say they were pulling into the lot, and Kal raced down to meet them.
As soon as Jordan and Alex exited the red Camry, Kal pounced. He hadn’t seen Alex in almost a year, since their DC hang the previous Halloween – and even though he saw Jordan a few nights a week, he loved the trio reuniting. “I saved us spots in the moose bunk!” he said, once the dabbing and hugging and general merriment of initial togetherness passed. “Grab your shit!”
By this point, the sun had set and the world was dark, but they were so far from New York that the sky had enough stars in it not just to shine, but to illuminate the world semi-functionally. It was a pleasant feeling, big and total, to stare up at the bright dark and listen to the pounding squeal of Kabbalat Shabbat on the lawn, courtesy of the Chelsea Shabbos Cats. The three college besties pulled the baggage, which contained 40% clothing and 60% drugs.
The bunk Kal selected was at the distant end of the U. It was the farthest from the center of Summit life and, so he’d hoped, more private. But when he creaked open the screen door, he saw a few beds claimed by travel bags, towels, and linens. No humans, just possessions. There were still twenty empty spots in the room, and the four friends took a quadrant of cots in the middle.
“I’m going to vomit I’m so excited,” Alex said, after dropping her stuff and admiring the bunk’s weathered and clearly well-loved interior, inscriptions and initials and memorials scrawled on the walls and reachable ceiling. “I took off Monday for recovery.”
“Speaking of, wanna get started?” Nic unzipped his and Alex’s duffel and pulled out a long fiberglass rectangle. Kal recognized it from Halloween, when it had been stuffed with green plants, white powder, pink pills, paper dabbies, and chocolate psilocybin bars. Nic opened it and Kal saw it still held the bud, pills, and mushroom bars, but no powder, which was fine with him. That shit got him flying, but at a devastating cost.
They stood on the porch. Nic got a pair of joints going and sent them around the circle in opposite loops. They puffed and passed, rejoicing in each other’s presence and the balmy beautiful late-summer night, and just as the second joint burned down, their cue to head to the music spot to dance and drink (in reverse order), someone appeared out of the swarming dark.
“Hey,” the newcomer called. “Is this the moose bunk?”
“It is!” Alex shone her phone at the plaque above the door. It showed a shadowy drawing of a large antlered animal.
“Sick. I’ve been trying to find it for like twenty minutes.”
“Want a hit?” Jordan held out the still-lit-but-barely joint.
“Sure, but first let me drop this.” He walked past them into the bunk, rolling a piece of luggage. He returned a minute later with a book in one hand. The other accepted a newly struck joint from Nic.
“I’m surprised you’re smoking on Shabbos,” Kal said.
The guy exhaled. “Why’s that?”
Kal gestured. “Because of your Talmud.”
He laughed. “I get that. But it’s not a religious thing. I’m in the middle of conducting a practical study on the 6th page of Brachot. I need it for some late night attempting.”
“Attempting? What are you –”
Kal never got his answer. A group of three girls were suddenly in front of them, two honeys, though neither as cute as Jordan or Alex. The girls asked if they had a wine opener, which they didn’t, but the decision was made for them all to follow the noise to where there would surely be wine openers aplenty, and so the seven of them started down the road toward the sounds and the lights, leaving the latecomer on the moose bunk porch holding his holy book.
The scene at the source was lightning; the music familiar and yet pleasantly illicit in the only way that songs written to be sung in Orthodox settings are when electrified and jammed out in pure chutzpadik glee. The bar (really, an enormous table) overflowed with all manner of drink, both for the turn up and recovery, and the food was in hot trays and deliciously familiar to anyone who ever attended a Shabbat meal at a Hillel.
The four friends ate and drank in a corner of the packed room until Kal saw old friends (from actual camp!) and went over to catch up. An hour or so later, he reunited with Jordan, who was hitting a bubbler in a circle of friendly nodding faces on the edge of a large basketball court where multiple games of poorly lit two-on-two were playing out.
“Hey, it’s the dude!” Jordan gave him a huge hug. He kissed her neck and took a hit from the pipe before sending it down the line, which included Alex and Nic and also the guy from their bunk. No sign of his Talmud, though.
“We have to support Ari tomorrow!” Alex said. The slur of her words crinkled Kal, reminding him of previous wonderful times with his two favorite party girls. Alex looked absolutely adorable in her big eyes and tiny shorts.
“Not the band,” Jordan said. “Ari. We only love Ari.” She giggled into a bit that must have developed in his absence. Jordan, with her ribbons of hair and smile lines down her mouth.
Nic, who always stayed comparatively sober around his wife and her druggy friends, quickly explained. “This is Ari,” he pointed to a tall dude with an undercut hairstyle rocking a chartreuse tee-shirt declaring MUSIC IS VENOMOUS. “He’s in a band. They’re playing a set tomorrow evening. At 7:30? At 7:30. The girls decided we’re superfans of the band.”
“Not the band,” Alex said. “Of Ari.”
“Oh sorry,” Nic backpedaled. “Of Ari.”
“Cool.” Kal accepted it without question, and shook Ari’s hand. He loved Alex and Jordan and himself and it was cherry-like to be essential to a crew so enviable in these settings. The bubbler made a few more passes down the circle, and they did a group tequila shot. A band was getting going in the rec hall, so in they went, and it was packed, a space of pure sound and bodies and lights, and it was dancing and feeling and hearing, all the things that made life wonderful, in Kal’s intoxicated estimation. (Also in his sober one).
The night whirled on and at 3:30 am, the three friends found themselves on a pair of swings in a playground near the lake. Jordan was splayed across Kal’s lap. Nic had called it a few hours earlier, kissing Alex good night and heading back to the bunk.
“Hey, is that Ari?” The scratch in Jordan’s voice sent Kal off.
“Where?” Alex twisted. “We haveta suppoord the baaand!!”
“Not the band, just the Ari.”
“Oh yeahhh. Where is he?”
“Over there.”
Kal looked where she pointed. Indeed he saw Ari, clearly recognizable in that haircut and Brat green tee. He was walking on a path along the lake with someone else. Kal squinted. “It’s the guy from our bunk. He has his book again.”
“Think they’re gonna fuck?”
Kal played with Jordan’s hair. “I dunno. Ari gives big bi. But that other guy, the Talmud makes me think religious. And so probably repressed.”
They watched the two men, who seemed somber and contemplative for hook-up vibes, until the night swallowed them, and after chugging some water (Alex had already brought up most of her belly an hour earlier), the trio made their way back to their bunk where everyone else (except one) was in bed and promptly passed out.
The next day, the one full day of the weekend camp, was a continuation. Kal and his crew overslept the hot breakfast, yoga by the water, tee-shirt tye-dyeing, and the meditational workshops. By the time he, Jordan, and Alex, made their way to the mess hall, groggy eyed and dragged-down by their thirty-three and thirty-four-year-old bodies (thirty-seven, in Nic’s case), it was nearly noon. There was still coffee and pastries and cereal and milk, and Nic, who had woken up at 8 am, was all too happy to tell them all about the hot delicious foods they missed and the cool new friends he made in their absence. They saw Ari outside and Kal was pleased to see that last night's camaraderie and bits had made it to the afternoon light. There was a gig later! They had to support Ari! Not the band! Only Ari! After breakfast, they returned to the moose bunk and like a quatrain of bungling narcotic detectives, they re-opened the drug case. They rolled beaucoup joints because weed was water, but Kal, Jordan, and Alex were most excited about the acid, which was beaded on small pieces of paper. These they took to the porch, where they placed them photogenically on their tongues and snapped a bunch of :P pre-trip selfies.
After the initial high, which was placeboid, they sat on the porch, smoking joints and alternating sips of Evian and White Claw, chatting amiably with passersby, awaiting and inviting the real high. The culture was very stash-friendly, and they all got off on how many offers they received for mind-altering substances by simply holding out their endless Js to whoever walked past. Ari stopped by at one point to smoke some weed and avail himself of this specific crew’s interest in gassing up him and him only. “How was your night?” Alex asked, eyes crinkling behind her big frames. “We saw you and that cute boy from our bunk. Did y’all go smoochy low lights?”
Ari hued red. “No, it was nothing. He’s cute, but not into me like that.”
“Did you make a move?”
“Nah. He’s a burner. It was weird.”
“How dare you? We’re all burners!” Jordan passed a joint.
“Not like this. He was a pyro. Had this baggy full of, I don’t even know what, and was looking for a place to light it up. A triangle of stones or something. A pyre. You know, the kind of stuff we do when the goyim aren’t around.”
A Talmudic memory surfaced in Kal’s brain, all those years in yeshiva prying through the hazy drug den of his mind. “What was he trying to burn?” Which daf was it?
Ari scoffed, took another hit. “A cat’s fetus? I dunno, it was knockoff witchcraft. Jewish flavored, I remember he called it that. Jewish flavored witchcraft. This is basically done by the way, cool if I kill it?” He crushed the remainder of the joint against the bottom of his Teva. “He wanted to put the ash in my eye, but I was like lo tov. You could put your dick in my eye no problem, but not your burnt fetus crumbles.”
Someone called Ari’s name – the drummer in his band – and he said bye and that he’d see them later at the gig, which set off Alex and Jordan, cheerleaders at the slightest cause, leaving Ari to jog off to a long ringing chant of his name.
The sun was high in the sky and the trees were rustling their song, which was a sign to Kal that the acid was taking effect; patterns and shapes and sounds in nature, especially trees, were his main trip takeaways. He never saw blown-up pop-culture style hallucinations and lowkey carried a vendetta against the many shows of his youth that promised LSD stood for something like Levitating Shapeshifting Demons when the reality was closer to Listening and Seeing Designs. Still cool, but pareidolia was not quite the same as staring at your reflection and seeing the skin flake off to reveal the red being underneath the epidermis — the true one, we’re all the same.
The girls were giggling – they too were clearly overcome – and even Nic got swept up in it, Nic, who was drinking and smoking weed, but otherwise drug-sitting his wife and her friends, a task he absolutely spun for. Someone was bumping Doja, perfect dip, perfect spirals, and then they were on the grass in front of their lawns and it was long like snakes but attached like hair, and it was fun and silly, and then somehow they were all in a wooden roll, which someone called a gaga court, which was for some reason the funniest thing Kal had ever heard, and for minutes he exhausted himself folding over in heaps of laughter.
At one point, he and Jordan went to the moose bunk for snacks. While she grabbed granola bars and Doritos, he went to the back of the bunk to pee. Spotted a flash of gold in the trash, and there, next to mussed paper towels, a used condom. Jordan came over.
“That’s from Nic and Alex,” she whispered, though there was no one else in the bunk and she was in no way prudish about sex. “They fucked here this morning. While we all slept.” She pointed to a small platform between the two showers. During the season it held crates of toiletries. That morning, apparently, it held their friends. “He put her up on that and they went at it with her head peeking out. Through that opening there.”
Kal was already hard. Jordan kissed his shoulders and his hands were in her hair.
“She was on lookout.” She kept up the whisper as she worked her way down him. “That’s how she put it. Meanwhile, he was doing his best to keep her quiet. You know how loud she is. You like that?”
“Yeah.”
“And that?”
“Yeah.”
“You like when I talk about our friends fucking?”
“Yeah.” It felt so good, the way she tugged him with her voice, the words a different lightly-dangerous catch-all, while her lips pulled lightly on his ribcage, and her hands, both of them, tugged and caressed on his dick and balls, massaging and teasing, moving them lightly in opposite. His hands found their own destinations, one in her mouth and the other in the wet opening where she spread for him, not only him, but mostly him. They rolled and moved in the back of the bunk and only stopped when Kal poked his head up.
“Why use condoms if you’re closed?”
Jordan stopped licking loops along his collarbone. Shrugged. “Birth control fucks with her moods. I don’t know, they don’t want kids but they do want to rub on each other. Same thing as anyone with a brain and a life before thirty.”
“You know you’re both thirty-nine, right?”
“Fuck you.” A proposition made easier by the fact that as she tongue-in-cheeked it, she tongued his cheek. A moment later she flawlessly slid a rubber on him, the only girl Kal had ever been with who was dexterous and comfortable enough to do that from first sex. Which he read then as a quick and eager adaptability to the flawed contours of the world, a better path to play than simply riding nature. It was the same impulse that sought fun in movement and party drugs, because the time was obviously better felt than the “natural” alternative. The fucking was hot and heightened, the way it gets when there’s a possibility of detection. Twice, while behind her, Kal demanded Jordan play lookout and stick her head out the opening. The second time she said, “Yeah, just like that pretty girl out there? You want to fuck her too, huh?” and that was when he caught up with himself, in that precise inner-outer alignment of bodily feel and soullike scrape, orgasm, and he spilled and spilled and saluted and slumped.
But only for a moment. The cabin door banged open, freakishly good timing, and Nic bumbled in. “Where are you guys? Alexandra says you’re fucking, but I put my money on pooping.”
“Porque no los dos?” Kal called out. He pulled off the condom, tossed it in the trash, and toweled down his now sensitive (but extremely grateful) little guy. He twisted on the shower. “You’re both wrong. The correct answer is c, showering.”
Nic said something that was lost over the water and another bang of the door meant he’d gone back out. Kal would have loved to shower with Jordan, which they’d done a few times before to both coital and post-coital splendor, but the stalls were designed for twelve-year-olds and thus presented a game of naked Tetris neither cared to crack in that particular moment. As Kal sudsed under the stream and smiled stupidly in his post-sex stupor, he noticed a small hole in the plastic siding of the shower wall. He poked it open with someone else’s toothbrush and by pressing down lifted a hole the size of a dime. This looked out, for no apparent reason, onto a patch of grass on the side of the cabin.
Maybe there was a reason.
Through the vagaries of the hole, Kal saw someone in the tall grass. Looked like Ari but also not, his legs on down were long and stretchy, and anyways Ari was at band practice. Back in the bunk, Jordan asked for conditioner, so he returned to the stall and tossed a bottle into hers. When he was able to fidget the two cuts open again, the figure was gone. Only the tall grass, swaying and moving lightly. Mesmeric.
Then Kal remembered he was tripping and nothing (and everything) was that big of a deal. He got out, blissed up, and dried off.
The afternoon slugged, in wide waves, pleasant and not terribly consequential. Fun time with friends and loved ones, truly the main meaning. They gathered on the benches on the lawn in front of the cabins, which abutted a lightly overgrown softball diamond, and then the grass itself. Around five, the skies gathered in a dark mood and Jordan gave voice to what they all were thinking.
“Storm’s knocking.”
Not a minute later there was a huge crack of thunder and the friends shrieked, overjoyed to be caught in a torrent, but also unprepared. They grabbed their spread clothing and notebooks and speakers and paraphernalia and bolted up the steps of the moose bunk and inside. The four friends were wet but nothing serious, caught in the thrill of the safe threat now averted, and gathered onto a single bed, probably the counselor’s, with a window looking out onto the storm. The world completely overtaken by broad sheets of enveloping rain leant a dark tint that Kal fucked hard with. Jordan sensed this. “Tell us a scary story.”
“Oh my gosh, yes!” Alex readily agreed.
Kal loved being the guy they turned to when they wanted to feel light fear. It was on account of the stories he wrote, and that one teenage vampire podcast. He stared out into the rain. “A scary story, huh?”
“Yes!” his cheerleaders cheered. Even Nic got caught up in the pep.
“Okay, here’s a horror story.” He felt like making trouble. “There was a huge storm at camp and Ari’s fans couldn’t make it to the gig.”
“No!” Alex screamed.
“We have to support Ari!” Jordan squealed. “Even if we have to swim!”
“I like that idea, though,” Nic said. “People stuck in a bunk during a storm story.”
Indeed it was a strong prompt, and Kal considered happenings, staring out into the relentless sheets, punctuated every half minute by the sky cracking its knuckles and the electricity of nature illuminating the abandoned field.
“Did you see that?” Jordan asked.
Kal didn’t say anything. He had seen it. During the last lightning burst, at the far end of the field. The approach of a person in the storm.
“Why’s he walking so slow?”
It was impossible to see through the rain and the next time the lightning granted temporary vision the person was much closer, but still walking in that unbothered manner. They could now see that his head was tilted back, facing up. Both hands were around his eyeballs, pinching them open like he was trying to wash them in the sky.
“Is that… Ari?” Alex asked.
“It is,” Jordan said. “What’s he doing out there?”
“Why’s he walking like that?”
Another lightning strike, and the slow-marching sky-eyed Ari passed the softball diamond. By the next flash he was at the edge of the moose porch and then he was outside the door, eyes still held upward. Trying to catch the many beads of rain.
“Ari!” Alex jumped off the cot and banged the door open. “Come in! What are you doing out there?”
Slowly, like a painting of transformation, Ari lowered his hands and then his head. His eyes were bleary and his lids pruned, fingers lengthened under tub water. “I had to wash.” His voice was hollow, different.
“How’d you get caught in the storm? I thought you were at band practice.”
“I had to wash.” Ari stepped into the bunk and Kal saw the enormous blue rainboots on his feet. They were so large they looked like buckets.
“What’s with the shoes?” he asked.
Ari ignored him. Maintained that unblinking focus. Turned his head slow, on a rolled pivot, like he sought something, like he knew what he wanted but not where to find it.
Kal and Jordan shared uneasy looks. Nic took a protective step over Alex.
“Your eyes okay?” Kal asked. “Do you need something? Lens solution?”
Ari turned to him. “Lens solution.”
Kal rummaged in his bag and pulled out a small bottle still encased in the plastic.
Ari took it and walked to the back of the bunk, trailing water like a snail.
The four friends whispered.
“What’s going on?”
“Is this a bit?”
“Why are his eyelids like that?”
“Is he going to be like this on stage?”
A minute passed.
“Ari?” Nic called out. “Everything okay back there?”
No response.
They checked it out. The back of the bunk was a mess. Ari was nowhere in sight. The trash was upside down, paper towels strewn everywhere, toiletries ransacked and littering the ground. The window was wide, the rainfall splashing in. Those big blue boots were the only sign Ari had been there at all, abandoned in a scrabble under the open window.
“What the fuck?” Kal asked in genuine confusion. The bottle of lens solution sat on the sink, outer plastic smooth and unbroken.
Nic closed the window. They regrouped in the front of the bunk, trying to figure out what was going on. The sky still squalled, but the lightning and thunder had passed and it was only half an hour before the world was splattered but no longer actively from above. The crew, famished and half on the come down from the plateau of drugs, made their way to the mess hall. There were hot trays of schnitzel and kugel, tins and tins of salad, and a pyramid of bagged chips and pretzels. Challah, dips, and spreads occupied a second table. The food was delicious, the surrounding presence of chattery people a nice balm to Ari’s eerie visit. Speaking of, Kal twisted a few times, trying to spot that giveaway hairstyle, seeking comfort, but Ari was nowhere to be seen.
They shared a few post-dinner joints with a crew of Upper West Siders five years younger and then music started from the rec and it was Ari’s band and they were wonderful. Ari was on stage, completely himself, commanding his part of the spotlight like a pro, making devil horns and sticking out his tongue at the four friends on multiple occasions. The dancing was amazing, the DJ set that followed Ari’s band more and more, and by the time Kal and Jordan passed out in their bunks that second, final night of Abie Taub’s third Summer Summit, it was a cherryful top to a wonderful over-deluged druggy-fun time.
The next morning was mostly clean-up and return to the city or wherever people hailed from. Three odd things as Kal peppered around, tidying up the bunk, a styrofoam cup of iced coffee at his elbow. The first was that the cot of the latecomer, the one with the Talmud, was completely empty, like he’d up and left without notice. Under the bare mattress, one corner peeking out, was a page ripped from the Talmud. Eruvin 18b. Kal turned it over, pocketed it. Second were the rainboots, still there in the back. He took them to Ari’s cabin, shoebill, a few further up the U, but Ari said he never saw them before. “Why would I get boots that big? A cock-sleeve, maybe, but look, I could fit two feet in one opening.” Kal asked a few questions about Ari’s appearance out of the rain yesterday, but his new friend’s response was so clearly genuine and non-understanding that Kal quickly dropped it.
The third thing, the most unusual, was when Kal returned to his bunk. Jordan had cleaned up the back and Kal was about to tie up the trash and haul it out when he saw the two ripped condom wrappers. Curious, he dug in the trash but didn’t find the condoms. He asked Jordan if she saw them. She said no, made a face. He scoured every inch of the back of the bunk, then the front, not sure why this felt so important, but it did, it really did, and he even checked the patch of grass on the side of the bunk, directly under the window. The condoms were gone, and with them the potential of the semen.
That whole ride back, Kal was quiet in the backseat, thinking of the guy with the Talmud, and the stolen cum, and the boots that didn’t fit, which nobody claimed. A few times, it felt like clarity was close, but as they neared Manhattan, the confusion receded into the fog of the weekend, camp but for adults, adults playing like kids but without limits, and by the time they crossed one of the many bridges into the city, it was already cemented in Kal’s brain as another druggy journey with his two favorite party girls (and Nic), and that was enough for him to hold and not consider further.
Not all signs of the shade dimming are proof of splayed feet.