Brown Eyed Girl
When I was in seventh grade, I went for to summer camp at Northwestern Missouri State University in Kirksville, Missouri. The college is better funded than the name might suggest, or at least better maintained – I remember being as much impressed by the well-kept lawns and fountains as I was by the freedom of being sent a thousand miles and four states away for six weeks. I wound up going to the camp – a program called Joseph Baldwin academy geared to high-achieving youngsters for two summers. The first summer I took a class in creative writing from a real-life college professor. The second year I focused on international politics and a girl named Susan whose hand I held on the way to dinner every night for three weeks. She was taking Algebra. College level Algebra. It was a very big deal, the hand-holding, and like most things that are a big deal to me, it ended badly. I once wrote a short-story which featured a woman who, distressed over the impending execution of her son, cried so much that her tear ducts were empty and she started crying blood. It turns out that no matter how sad you are, that doesn’t happen.
My history with summer camp was already long and storied by the time I attended Joseph Baldwin. Here are all the summer camps I went to in my life.
Camp Doublecreek – I went here from ages really young to still pretty damn young. This place was fun. My sister was a counselor when I attended, as was her friend Yvette, and one time Yvette walked over to me, picked me up, turned me upside down, and put me in a trash can. I still don’t know why.
Laity Lodge Youth Camp – There were spiders here, mostly Daddy Long Legs, which are terrifying. This camp was Christian, a fact which seems obvious now but didn’t dawn on me until the closing night bonfire, where all of the sudden you couldn’t sit down without finding yourself in the loving lap of our Lord and Savior. I remember looking around in alarm; what the hell, you know? One of my co-campers, Luis, claimed to be a lieutenant in the San Antonio Crips, a claim I now doubt in direct proportion to the extent I believed it then, as we were both 12 at the time. Another notable thing about LLYC was the fact that it was run by the unfortunately named Howard E. Butts family, who owned and ran the H.E.B. grocery store chain. Every term we had a steak dinner, in which the steak the store butcher’s dog wouldn’t eat, having been frozen and thawed a couple of times, was fed to little kids.
Camp Longhorn – I wished I was dead here. One of the activities was a one mile swim in a murky river, with no place to stop and rest, not even I riverbank to cling to, along the way. Holy shit. One of my cabin counselors was called “Nad,” which was at the time really, really awesome.
Joseph Baldwin Academy – Detailed account to follow.
Baylor Debate Camp – Eeeeeee! Debate camp! Eeeeeeeeeeeee! I got into Harvard, though, so who’s the silly debate fag now, Luis? You are.
Anyways – Joseph Baldwin was probably the most fun out of all my camp experiences, as I managed to make friends both years I attended. The friend groups were dramatically different; my creative writing year I made friends with a large girl named Angela and her waxy-haired roommate, whose name I forget but who wore the same Nirvana shirt, the one with a big close-up of Kurt Cobain’s unhappy maw, like every day. The next year I befriended a bunch of dorky geeks in my International Politics Seminar. We used to steal copies of USA Today from the newspaper kiosk between our dorm building and the dining hall, and read all about the airplane crash that dominated the news at the time. We had a number of theories regarding what nation had set up the surface-to-air missile attack that had downed the plane, and were all stunned when something to do with wiring was pinned down as the actual culprit.
Anyway, Susan - holy shit. I remember literally nothing about the relationship, which, given the extent to which all the horrible things that have ever happened seem to remember me, given how permanent they are and how ephemeral I seem in comparison, flickering against their pain-drenched backdrops like the cast-off silhouette of an ill-fated shadow puppet, indicates that I was happy while I was with her.
I have been asked to point out at this point that Daddy Long Legs are not, actually, spiders. They have six legs. Another thing I should mention in this digressionary paragraph is that one of the two years I attended Laity Lodge Youth Camp was the year after Kurt Cobain killed himself. One of the campers – who, like all the campers except Luis – Luis actually went by Bladez, actually, but Luis was his Christian name – was a middle class white kid, was convinced that not only was Kurt Cobain not really dead, but neither was Tupac Shakur, and that both were living under the name Mock A Velli somewhere small, but not so small that they would be completely stifled by rural values. Such was this intense kid’s conviction, and the charisma that stemmed from it, that everyone in my cabin, including me, believed him. We also all firmly identified with either the East or West Coast in the rap wars that were ripping the country apart that summer, and there were consequences for picking either the wrong coast or obviously picking a coast at random. I managed to do both.
Our song, Susan and me, our song was Brown Eyed Girl, which is by Van Morrison, who I’ve been told is awesome. I have no idea how Brown Eyed Girl became our song. I have no idea how we would have come to be in a position where we were listening to music together, let alone Best of Van Morrison. That said, it was definitely our song, and it is a song I will correspondingly always associate with romance. Here’s the thing, though: her eyes were green. Not hazel, mind you, I’m not one of those guys – you know those guys – but green, like evil cat green. Mine were brown, but I was a dude, so the applicability of the song, whose status as our song neither of us seemed inclined to question, was never clear to me.
At this point I may seem to be contradicting myself; you could argue that details I’m providing and the repeated claims I’ve made not to remember anything about the relationship are, at best, at loggerheads. First off, who actually uses the phrase “at loggerheads?” Secondly, it’s one of those things – I remember lots of little bits and pieces, but little to none of the narrative behind them. It’s weird. The only overarching thing I remember from the two weeks that constituted my first real relationship was the feeling that finally, finally, I had become something resembling, on not-too-close inspection, at least, a man. In any case, we’ve reached the end of things I remember while not remembering, so settle down.
Susan and I broke up, tragically, when camp ended and I went back to Texas, and she went back to wherever she was from, possibly Florida. In keeping with our natural disinclination for long, drawn-out goodbyes, I don’t remember saying any, or seeing each other after dinner the night before camp ended, which was indistinguishable from the other nights we ate together. We had certainly never discussed the possibility of a long-term relationship, although it’s possible something in my body language signaled a readiness for long term commitment, and emotional check my soul couldn’t begin to cash. But that seems unlikely to me now, as for the most part my body just communicated “I’m uncomfortable in this situation” or “please remove me from this situation as I find it uncomfortable.” It made and makes sense to me that we, just like Nerd Camp, were through. Apparently it had just hit a rocky patch.
About two weeks after I got home, I got a phone call from Susan. We exchanged phrases, many about the Northeast Missouri State campus and how it used to have a lot of fountains. She had just started school. School was fun for her, as I said it was for me, but I was the only one who was totally lying, I think. Finally, Susan got down to business: she couldn’t take the strain of a long term relationship, it was just too hard, and she was calling it quits. This struck me, at the time, as fair. It was also confusing, for a number of reasons, not least of which was the wording she used to conclude our first and last phone conversation: I bought my ticket with my tears and that’s all I’m going to spend.
Those of you familiar with 60’s psychedelic pop can disregard this next sentence. That sentence is a lyric from a song called “Red Rubber Ball” by the band Cyrkle. They produced no other hits.
In the days that followed, I went from bemused to confused to angry to sad as it became clear to me that I had been dumped, had been kicked out of a relationship that I had forgotten I was in, which only made it worse.. Then, all of the sudden, I believe it was in Geometry class, as I was telling the girl sitting next to me about the crazy chick who’d broken up with me using song lyrics, I went from semi-adult, relationship having male to gender-robbed mopebag, arguably permanently, because I realized what I should have known all along, what in retrospect was all-too-obvious. It was then that I realized that I was, in fact, the brown eyed girl.
My history with summer camp was already long and storied by the time I attended Joseph Baldwin. Here are all the summer camps I went to in my life.
Camp Doublecreek – I went here from ages really young to still pretty damn young. This place was fun. My sister was a counselor when I attended, as was her friend Yvette, and one time Yvette walked over to me, picked me up, turned me upside down, and put me in a trash can. I still don’t know why.
Laity Lodge Youth Camp – There were spiders here, mostly Daddy Long Legs, which are terrifying. This camp was Christian, a fact which seems obvious now but didn’t dawn on me until the closing night bonfire, where all of the sudden you couldn’t sit down without finding yourself in the loving lap of our Lord and Savior. I remember looking around in alarm; what the hell, you know? One of my co-campers, Luis, claimed to be a lieutenant in the San Antonio Crips, a claim I now doubt in direct proportion to the extent I believed it then, as we were both 12 at the time. Another notable thing about LLYC was the fact that it was run by the unfortunately named Howard E. Butts family, who owned and ran the H.E.B. grocery store chain. Every term we had a steak dinner, in which the steak the store butcher’s dog wouldn’t eat, having been frozen and thawed a couple of times, was fed to little kids.
Camp Longhorn – I wished I was dead here. One of the activities was a one mile swim in a murky river, with no place to stop and rest, not even I riverbank to cling to, along the way. Holy shit. One of my cabin counselors was called “Nad,” which was at the time really, really awesome.
Joseph Baldwin Academy – Detailed account to follow.
Baylor Debate Camp – Eeeeeee! Debate camp! Eeeeeeeeeeeee! I got into Harvard, though, so who’s the silly debate fag now, Luis? You are.
Anyways – Joseph Baldwin was probably the most fun out of all my camp experiences, as I managed to make friends both years I attended. The friend groups were dramatically different; my creative writing year I made friends with a large girl named Angela and her waxy-haired roommate, whose name I forget but who wore the same Nirvana shirt, the one with a big close-up of Kurt Cobain’s unhappy maw, like every day. The next year I befriended a bunch of dorky geeks in my International Politics Seminar. We used to steal copies of USA Today from the newspaper kiosk between our dorm building and the dining hall, and read all about the airplane crash that dominated the news at the time. We had a number of theories regarding what nation had set up the surface-to-air missile attack that had downed the plane, and were all stunned when something to do with wiring was pinned down as the actual culprit.
Anyway, Susan - holy shit. I remember literally nothing about the relationship, which, given the extent to which all the horrible things that have ever happened seem to remember me, given how permanent they are and how ephemeral I seem in comparison, flickering against their pain-drenched backdrops like the cast-off silhouette of an ill-fated shadow puppet, indicates that I was happy while I was with her.
I have been asked to point out at this point that Daddy Long Legs are not, actually, spiders. They have six legs. Another thing I should mention in this digressionary paragraph is that one of the two years I attended Laity Lodge Youth Camp was the year after Kurt Cobain killed himself. One of the campers – who, like all the campers except Luis – Luis actually went by Bladez, actually, but Luis was his Christian name – was a middle class white kid, was convinced that not only was Kurt Cobain not really dead, but neither was Tupac Shakur, and that both were living under the name Mock A Velli somewhere small, but not so small that they would be completely stifled by rural values. Such was this intense kid’s conviction, and the charisma that stemmed from it, that everyone in my cabin, including me, believed him. We also all firmly identified with either the East or West Coast in the rap wars that were ripping the country apart that summer, and there were consequences for picking either the wrong coast or obviously picking a coast at random. I managed to do both.
Our song, Susan and me, our song was Brown Eyed Girl, which is by Van Morrison, who I’ve been told is awesome. I have no idea how Brown Eyed Girl became our song. I have no idea how we would have come to be in a position where we were listening to music together, let alone Best of Van Morrison. That said, it was definitely our song, and it is a song I will correspondingly always associate with romance. Here’s the thing, though: her eyes were green. Not hazel, mind you, I’m not one of those guys – you know those guys – but green, like evil cat green. Mine were brown, but I was a dude, so the applicability of the song, whose status as our song neither of us seemed inclined to question, was never clear to me.
At this point I may seem to be contradicting myself; you could argue that details I’m providing and the repeated claims I’ve made not to remember anything about the relationship are, at best, at loggerheads. First off, who actually uses the phrase “at loggerheads?” Secondly, it’s one of those things – I remember lots of little bits and pieces, but little to none of the narrative behind them. It’s weird. The only overarching thing I remember from the two weeks that constituted my first real relationship was the feeling that finally, finally, I had become something resembling, on not-too-close inspection, at least, a man. In any case, we’ve reached the end of things I remember while not remembering, so settle down.
Susan and I broke up, tragically, when camp ended and I went back to Texas, and she went back to wherever she was from, possibly Florida. In keeping with our natural disinclination for long, drawn-out goodbyes, I don’t remember saying any, or seeing each other after dinner the night before camp ended, which was indistinguishable from the other nights we ate together. We had certainly never discussed the possibility of a long-term relationship, although it’s possible something in my body language signaled a readiness for long term commitment, and emotional check my soul couldn’t begin to cash. But that seems unlikely to me now, as for the most part my body just communicated “I’m uncomfortable in this situation” or “please remove me from this situation as I find it uncomfortable.” It made and makes sense to me that we, just like Nerd Camp, were through. Apparently it had just hit a rocky patch.
About two weeks after I got home, I got a phone call from Susan. We exchanged phrases, many about the Northeast Missouri State campus and how it used to have a lot of fountains. She had just started school. School was fun for her, as I said it was for me, but I was the only one who was totally lying, I think. Finally, Susan got down to business: she couldn’t take the strain of a long term relationship, it was just too hard, and she was calling it quits. This struck me, at the time, as fair. It was also confusing, for a number of reasons, not least of which was the wording she used to conclude our first and last phone conversation: I bought my ticket with my tears and that’s all I’m going to spend.
Those of you familiar with 60’s psychedelic pop can disregard this next sentence. That sentence is a lyric from a song called “Red Rubber Ball” by the band Cyrkle. They produced no other hits.
In the days that followed, I went from bemused to confused to angry to sad as it became clear to me that I had been dumped, had been kicked out of a relationship that I had forgotten I was in, which only made it worse.. Then, all of the sudden, I believe it was in Geometry class, as I was telling the girl sitting next to me about the crazy chick who’d broken up with me using song lyrics, I went from semi-adult, relationship having male to gender-robbed mopebag, arguably permanently, because I realized what I should have known all along, what in retrospect was all-too-obvious. It was then that I realized that I was, in fact, the brown eyed girl.
posted by Jeremy at 10:59 AM
1 Comments:
That was a great story. I actually was looking for something else when I came here, but I got involved in your story and had to finish reading it. Your writing style is understatedly amusing...I love it! I'll have to go check out some of your other posts now :)
RockerChick
San Antonio Rocks
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