When I was a kid, I would bug my dad relentlessly about the possibility of going to “summer camp.”

I would tell him that all my cool friends went to overnight camp during the summer… on account of the fact that THEIR dads actually loved them. Because two of the defining aspects of my dad’s personality are his Scottish frugality and his emotional Asperger’s, he never budged a bit.

One day, without any reason given, he submitted, and told me that he was going to send me off to “CAMP HIGHROAD” in the mountains of western Virginia. For a full week! I was so excited, I almost pee’d my hand me-down Garanimals.

Inside this trojan horse of summer water sports was a bunch of Bible-wielding rednecks itching for a Holy war.

Because “CAMP HIGHROAD” was, in fact, Jesus Camp.

See, the THIRD defining aspect of my dad’s personality is his religious fundamentalism. I guess he figured that if he was going to waste his hard earned government employee money on a camp, his children better get some eternal salvation in the process.

I’m not sure why, at age 8, my dad thought I needed to be saved. Perhaps he was aware of my FUN DIP addiction. Perhaps he knew that I was up to 6 Oreos a day and dangerously beginning to move into Doublestuff. Or possibly, since I had a terrible and lateral lisp that no speech therapist could seem to lick, he suspected something more Satanically systemic….

The logo of ‘Camp Highroad’ was a black cross with a serpentine red flame curling perilously close to it…. Hmmmm, wooden cross… about to be on fire… hills of Virginia?… In retrospect, the calculus was pretty easy.

The camp (like my dad) Trojan-horsed their religious agenda inside a zippity-do-dah “ADVENTURELAND.” We did the same outdoorsy activities that everybody else did everywhere else. The only difference was that we did every camp activity for the glory of Jesus: canoeing, ziplines, and, often, atomic wedgies, for Jesus.

The highlight of camp had to be the campfire. Every night, we sat around a huge bonfire, read sermons, and sang terrifying songs about the second coming of Jesus Christ in the imminent “rapture” as we roasted marshmallows — or as the counselors jokingly called them, “Sinners.” It was a regular Jesus Jamboree with splashes of fear and xenophobia thrown in.

I imagine Camp Highroad had the same type of kids as a regular sleepaway camp. The only difference, I later realized, was that a lot of the kids at Highroad were clearly there to learn how to let Jesus, the Son of God, enter into their young hearts so that they wouldn’t be tempted to let Hay-soos, the Poolboy, enter into their young buttholes. Maybe my lazy and sloppy “esses” had made my father wonder about my sexuality because it seemed that an unspoken mission of Camp Highroad was to exorcise “faggotry” whenever it reared its ugly head…. or whenever a kid’s head was on rears.

Any institution THAT anti-gay was, not surprisingly, chockful o’ gay. But enough about the Republican Party.

It shouldn’t shock you then that my second strongest memory from Camp Highroad involves being constantly exposed to peni. After daily swimming classes, all the kids AND counselors would hop in the communal showers together. The adults would casually walk around the changing room naked like it was some ancient Greek mentorship program. Some of the counselors even did the overtly homosexual maneuver (as seen at “CRUNCH” fitness) of putting on every single bit of clothing, even socks and watch, before finally, and begrudgingly, shimmying into their tight briefs.

Even at that young age, I knew something was fucked up about that. Tube socks, a wristwatch, and a cock should never, ever be seen at the exact same time. I think that is actually a subset of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

I also knew there was something VERY wrong about the sight of a 12 year-old kid with a two inch hairless acorn standing next to a 25 year-old counselor lathering his hair — arms up in a Calvin Klein billboard pose — as shampoo froth funneled down through his butt cheeks. I seemed to be the only person who was freaked out by the “openness” of it all. I never showered once. I would just sit there, mouth agape, looking at all the different dicks like bizarre fish in an aquarium, feeling like Darwin probably did after his first trip to the Galapagos.

Having only seen my own kit and caboodle previously, I was shell-shocked. I remember, at one point, staring at this southern kid Jake’s penis. He was a pale kid and his penis looked painfully purple and diminutive. It was like someone had sewn a maroon button into the seam of his crotch. I gazed, slack-jawed in astonishment. All of a sudden, he shouted across the locker room in a squeaky Huckleberry Hound accent: “Hey, what are you lookin’ at? We all got one!”

I wanted to say, “Yeah, but not a purple one like THAT, E.T.! It looks like it got burned in a space fire!”

The worst part about class with the NAMBLA synchronized swim team was the fact that I was a crappy swimmer. To get around the swim test towards the end of week, I gave myself “the flu” by asking to see the nurse and putting the thermometer against a desk lamp bulb when she wasn’t looking. My temperature came out to 120 degrees. I exclaimed, “Wow, I didn’t realize I was that sick!” The nurse gave me a knowing smirk and wrote a pass to excuse me.

Thankfully, I wouldn’t have to do the backstroke for Jesus.

I did, however, have my first fight for Jesus.

I don’t remember exactly why I got into a fight with this particular kid. I just remember that he baby talked a lot. Many of the kids there baby talked about the Bible, and it irked the everliving fuck out of me. I would look around when the kid was doing it, like “Is it just me!?” I felt like the protagonist in one of those Michael Bay films where you have to convince the President’s cabinet that the world is going to end unless they do something immediately, and they just look at you like you’re smoking a crack pipe.

Much like this President and his Cabinet, I found a lousy pretense other than the truth (the baby talk) to attack, and I preemptively pushed the kid. I don’t think punches were thrown. I just remember him pinning my head against the dusty wood slats of the cabin floor and saying, in the baby talkiest of baby talk patois: “Okay, aw you weady to quit now? Can’t we be fwiends?” He won. I guess God was on his side. It was beyond humiliating.

I will say this about Camp Highroad: that place works!

First of all, by the end of camp, any latent gay I might have had in me was wiped completely out thanks to baby talking quasi-fags and ugly purple cocks burning indelible scars into the parts of my brain responsible for shame, sexual gratification, and long-term memory.

Second of all, I DID have a born-again moment at that camp where I asked Jesus to enter into my heart.

I vividly remember when it happened, and it was also probably the FIRST time I sincerely prayed to Jesus. After the fight, I was uncertain of who to turn to, or where to go to share my pain, I humblydropped to my knees by my short-sheeted cot and prayed:

“Dear Jesus. . . . Please get me the fuck out of Jesus Camp . . . in Jesus’ name I pray. . . . Amen. ”

The next day, I called my dad at the camp office and told him to pick me up. Two days early.

I thought he would be furious with me for not finishing the program, but, as he has my entire life, he surprised me with his kind and gentle nature. He didn’t tell me I was a disappointment to him or say one stern word. He even took me to Arby’s, my favorite restaurant, for lunch. He didn’t ask me about God, and he didn’t make me talk about the fight, the forfeited swim test, or the purple-penised fag and Jew haters.

Despite his Republican fundamentalism, I think he knew that, more than a soul that needed saving, I was his confused and scared son.

So . . . we just sat there, father and son, eating America’s roast beef in silent communion.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 1st, 2010 at 6:37 pm and is filed under All blog entries. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.