Eating My Feelings Read online

  “What the hell is this?” I asked.

  “Your stepmother and I felt that it was time for you try a different camp,” my father said.

  “Oh really?” I replied. “Wasn’t it her idea to send me to Stagedoor in the first place?” It was. However, the only reason that she sent me to camp was because it got my little brother and me out of the house during part of the summer, although Kevin went to an all-boys sports camp in Maine and I sashayed off to Stagedoor. Those were the months the court said we were supposed to be spending with my father. She did not want us around; therefore, she did it to benefit herself.

  “Yes it was,” the evil whore said. “But now I—I mean we—think it’s best for you to move on. The boys at your old camp were a little—”

  “Different,” my father interrupted. “They were a little different. We think it’s time for you to be around other boys your age and … well … play sports.”

  “Seriously?” I asked.

  “Yes,” my father replied. “It will be wonderful. It’s a basketball camp. An all-boys basketball camp.”

  Words such as basketball were not in my vocabulary. My father gave a pantomime demo on what the sport involved and I wanted no part of it.

  “You did this!” I screamed at my stepmother, “and you will pay!” I said as I ran out of the room. Earlier that year, Blair had pushed Téa out of a window on One Life to Live. I hoped that life was about to imitate art in my house. All I needed to do was find a big window and throw that bitch out of it. I’d try to get off on a technicality, like temporary insanity. I was only twelve, but I was willing to risk it, and knew with the right amount of makeup and a good old-fashioned crooked lawyer, I would probably be able to.

  “WHAT THE FUCK?” my mother yelled into the phone the next day. “Mark loved that theater camp, and you are sending him to … basketball camp? Really?”

  My mother, forever my champion, was livid that my father had switched things up behind her back. She realized that I belonged at Stagedoor and that a chimpanzee would have fared better at a basketball camp than me. I sat there and watched my mother go off on my father over the phone. As I listened to their conversation, I began to wonder if there was something really wrong with me. There must have been if my father and evil stepmother would go to such great lengths to literally turn my life upside down. It wasn’t until later in life that I realized, I had it right all along.

  “Well,” my mother said as she hung up the phone, “it looks like you’re screwed.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Your asshole of a father put down a fifteen-thousand-dollar, nonrefundable deposit on the camp, so you have to go or he is out a ton of money.”

  “I have to?”

  “You should go,” she said. “He’s an asshole, but that’s a lot of money and he wants to help you … I think.” It seemed as though we were both confused as to whom this camp was actually helping.

  “Okay, but if he wants to help me and thinks I am gay, why in the world would he send me to an all-boys camp?”

  “He’s an idiot. Plain and simple.”

  “I don’t know anything about this camp. I don’t even know where it is,” I said.

  “It’s outside of Boston. In New Hampshire.”

  “New Hamp … shire?” This state was clearly not on my radar.

  “Yes, New Hampshire. It’s only a month, Mark. Maybe it will be fun.”

  “Well, Mother,” I said, “we all thought that Kimberly blowing up Melrose Place was going to be fun and look at what a mess that turned out to be!”

  It turns out, there are places worse than D.C. after all. Hidden Crest, New Hampshire, for example, is one of them. Located near Dartmouth College, Hidden Crest is a quaint and dreary lakeside town where the devil and his children set up shop and called it a summer camp. As my father and stepmother dropped me off in this fresh hell, I finally mustered up the courage to use a word that I had been waiting to drop at just the right occasion.

  “CUNT!” I yelled at my stepmother.

  “MARK!” my father yelled.

  “That’s what she is. She is a cunt. And the worst part is, she knows it.”

  My stepmother just stood there and smiled at me. She was probably thinking about how she was going to poison my father, get away with it, and steal all of his money while I was gone at camp.

  “I HATE YOU!” I yelled at my father. “But I hate her more!”

  “Why me?” the devil whisperer questioned.

  “BECAUSE THIS WAS ALL YOUR IDEA!” I yelled at the top of my lungs. Other parents dropping their children off began to casually eavesdrop on our conversation as they sent their children on their way. I continued at foghorn level: “I’m not even your son; I don’t know why you even care. Why can’t you just let me do what I want to do? I wasn’t hurting anyone.”

  “Because you are not acting how a boy is supposed to act,” she replied.

  “Oh, and you know so much about how boys are supposed to act, don’t you?” I said. “You don’t even know how women your own age are supposed to act. Someone who drinks as much, smokes as much, and takes as many pills as you do should not be telling anyone how to act!” Had I been about ten years older, the two of us would have most likely been the best of friends due to her bad habits. She’s pretty much everything I look for in a friend in adulthood, but at twelve, I hated her.

  “YOU’RE SUCH A BRAT!” my stepmother yelled.

  “Oh yeah?” I said. “I may be a brat, BUT YOU’RE STILL A CUNT!” I was so incredibly loud that everyone around us stopped dead in their tracks. Had this been a cartoon, an elderly woman would have said, “My word,” as her monocle dropped into her champagne glass. I wondered where the hell Kimberly was. Couldn’t she have blown up my stepmother instead of my beloved Heather Locklear?

  “Hello,” a man said as he came up behind me.

  “HOLY SHIT!” I yelled. He scared me. He came at me like the Flash, but when I turned around a small, sixty-something-year-old man was standing there, wearing a Polo shirt with a monogrammed H on it. I was hoping the H stood for Hello, Dolly!, a production that was possibly in the works for later in the summer, but much to my chagrin, it stood for Hidden Crest. I turned around again to see what my father and stepmother were up to, but when I looked behind me all I saw was a cloud of smoke. They had driven away so quickly and without a proper good-bye that I felt abandoned. Kind of like how Dumpster prom babies must feel.

  “Welcome to Hidden Crest,” the man said. “You must be Mark. I’m Carl. I hear you are not very happy to be here?”

  “What tipped you off? The fact that I just called my stepmother a cunt or the fact that I am currently planning an escape route in my head right now?”

  “Oh, there is no escaping Hidden Crest, my friend,” Carl said eerily. “There isn’t a town around here for miles. You’ll be walking a mighty long time to find anyone to help you.”

  “I’ll find a way—just you wait.” Clearly my smart-ass shenanigans were not going to fly here. If I was going to escape, I was going to have to befriend everyone, then turn on them.

  “Let me show you around,” Carl said. The first stop was the cafeteria, a place I hoped to be spending a majority of the summer.

  The camp owner showed me around the cafeteria as he chatted about the food.

  “It’s all very healthy for you. Everything is cooked to order. Lean meats, vegetables, everything a caveman would have eaten. No pastas, no starches, etcetera.”

  He was omitting the best parts. “Wait … What?” I asked. “What kind of desserts do you serve? Pineapple upside-down cake? Funfetti cake? Cupcakes? Some form of cake, please, God, tell me you have cake!”

  “No cakes here. We serve fruit for dessert.”

  I had officially entered Nazi Germany. Stagedoor always offered cake for dessert. None of the eating-disorders-to-be ever partook in such offerings, but I always ate whatever they didn’t want.

  “What the hell kind of operation are you running he
re?”

  “It’s a healthy camp for boys,” Carl said.

  “Is it …?” I couldn’t bear to say the words myself, “… a …”

  “It’s not a fat camp,” he said.

  “FAT CAMP? Oh my God!” I put my hands to my face and began to weep. My all-time favorite movie as a child was Heavyweights, a movie about fat kids who were sent to Camp Hope to lose weight. You know that feeling you get the moment you realize something is hilarious until it’s actually happening to you? Like when you’re watching Weekend at Bernie’s and you’re thinking: Wow, this movie is hilarious! I wish I was spending every weekend with Bernie. However, if you had to cart a dead guy around for an entire weekend while pretending he was alive it would be not only not funny but gross, exhausting, and illegal. That was my moment.

  The difference between this camp and the camp from Heavyweights was that there were very few fat people at this camp. A majority of the campers were returnees who wanted to keep their weight off. The owner of the camp sent me off to my cabin, where I promptly put the Clueless soundtrack into my portable CD player and began reading from cover to cover the Soap Opera Digest I had bought at the airport. I was about to miss my stories for a full month. I had to make sure there was something, anything, to keep me connected to what was going on.

  I slept for about two days until someone had the nerve to wake me up.

  “Hello,” a kid yelled as he poked me with a stick. “Hello, it’s Jeremy. Your bunkmate. It’s time to wake up. You’ve been sleeping for an awfully long time.”

  “OH SHIT!” I yelled.

  “What is it?” Jeremy asked.

  “It wasn’t a dream. I’m living a nightmare,” I said.

  “What are you talking about?” Jeremy asked.

  “I thought my coming to this awful place was a dream, but it turns out it’s not. I am really here,” I said. “I’m supposed to be singing show tunes all summer long, not attempting to lose weight with you, Poindexter.”

  “You could stand to lose a few,” Jeremy said as he gave me the once-over.

  “Mind your business,” I replied. “It’s bad enough that my idiot father told me this was basketball camp. Now I’m being told it’s a backward-ass fat camp. I’ll tell you what, kid, as this web of lies continues to untangle, it’s very reminiscent of when Michael found out that Sydney was a prostitute on Melrose Place. That didn’t end very well, and I’m pretty sure this won’t either.”

  “Come on,” Jeremy said. “I promise you’ll have fun.”

  “As if!”

  “As if what?”

  “Never mind,” I said. I hadn’t eaten in about two days and I was starving. “Can we eat?”

  “Yes, it’s time for breakfast,” Jeremy said. “Change your clothes and let’s go. If you want to take a shower, you can walk down the path to the showers.” I certainly needed something. Mosquitoes had violated my body while I slept, and I was itching everywhere.

  “Showers? As in the plural of a shower?”

  “Yes,” he replied, “everyone showers together.”

  Gay.

  “I don’t think I have the strength to shower right now, because I am so incredibly hungry, so let’s eat.” There was no way I was going to shower with a bunch of guys. What would happen if I got excited? Then all the boys would know I was a homo. However, none of the other boys rolled into camp with a bottle of Melrose Place cologne, which would have clearly tipped anyone off, but that was safely put away, with my Soap Opera Digest in the bottom of my suitcase. I was going to have to change my ways in order to fit in. I felt like Demi Moore in G.I. Jane. She had to change her ways to fit in with the boys in the army. However, shaving my head was out of the question.

  Jeremy took me down to the cafeteria and we ate a healthy breakfast of soggy oatmeal and bananas. Day one and I hated it already. But Jeremy was lovely. He was super cute and super fit. He was an “after,” meaning he had already lost weight and came back because he actually liked it and wanted to keep the weight off. When he was telling me all of this I felt as if he was speaking Mandarin, because everything he said made absolutely no sense to me whatsoever. But he was a funny kid. He would try to tell jokes and fuck up the ending, so every joke ended with: “Oh, no, what I meant to say was … and that’s why that joke is supposed to be funny.”

  “Jeremy, honey,” I said, as if I were Joan Collins on Dynasty, though I would have been smoking a candy cigarette instead of a real one, “a joke isn’t funny if you say ‘and that’s why the joke is supposed to be funny.’ It’s just supposed to be funny. And that wasn’t.” They never were, but Jeremy gave me the lay of the land and showed me where everything was.

  That afternoon was water sports afternoon where everyone would team up with a buddy and do an activity on the lake. I had asked if there was a swimming pool to lounge around by and possibly get some sun, but was informed there was no pool, just a crib, a roped-off section, in a dirty lake to swim in. In my usual fashion of being a lazy fat-ass, I had already befriended the nurse, who was the only woman on the campus, and told her my story. Her name was Leslie and we bonded over a mutual love of One Life to Live. She had a TV in her nurse’s office, so I figured I would be seeing a lot of her that summer. Having read Soap Opera Digest earlier in the week, I knew Carlo Hesser was strolling back into Llanview that Friday, so I had to plan some sort of ailment to take place around two in the afternoon, one central time, later that week. But that day, with storm clouds looming, I thought about faking an illness to get out of doing any sort of physical activity. It was past three in the afternoon, enough time to catch the tail end of General Hospital if I left then, but I figured it may be best to stick this one out and save the dramatics of faking an ailment for a more important time, such as having to run track or something ridiculous like that. Jeremy suggested that we get into a canoe and row around the lake. I had never been in a canoe before, but he assured me he would spearhead the operation.

  We both got into the canoe but the water was looking a bit choppy. We swayed back and forth as we entered and sat on the wooden slabs inside. God love Jeremy for knowing what the hell was going on, because immediately I almost tipped us over. I wasn’t the best of swimmers because when I was in the water I looked more like a piece of muffin floating in a cup of coffee. I would just float around and embrace my fatness. This canoe was a foreign object to me and the two of us did not get along. How had I come to this? All I wanted to do that summer was grow bangs and lovingly sing “Something’s Coming” to a white girl pretending to be Puerto Rican. What the hell happened?

  As we began canoeing around the lake, a man in a speedboat approached us. He had a few kids in his boat with him and at first I thought he might be taking everyone to the MTV beach house.

  “HEY, JEREMY!” the man yelled.

  “GLENN!” Jeremy yelled back at the camp counselor.

  “Who the hell is that?” I asked. Glenn looked like a douche bag. He was wearing sunglasses, when he clearly needed nothing to block his eyes from the absent sun. He was shirtless, had a beard that was reminiscent of something a rapist would sport, and was just all-around gross looking. He really looked like one of those guys who just randomly showed up at girls’ high-school basketball games for no apparent reason.

  “CIRCLE AROUND US AND MAKE OUR CANOE ROCK!” Jeremy yelled.

  “Ummm … how about not?” I asked.

  “Come on, Mark, it’ll be fun. Like we’re in a whirlpool.”

  “I am fine just gliding around the lake, thank you very much.”

  But Jeremy didn’t listen and Glenn began circling around our canoe with the intent to kill. Some people should never be allowed in the same room as a child, let alone counsel them at a summer camp. Glenn was one of those people. He continued to circle our canoe and we began swaying back and forth.

  “Seriously, he needs to stop,” I told Jeremy.

  “We’ll be fine,” Jeremy said as our canoe tipped over.

  This was the second time in
two years that my life flashed before my eyes. Two near-death experiences in less than twenty-four months at the hands of my diabolical nemesis: Stacey. I started blaming her for everything, even when she wasn’t there. Underwater, I quickly began to contemplate whether or not to fight. Could I possibly go through another month of agonizing torture or should I just call it a day and die now? Nothing fun was going to happen this summer and I had had a pretty good run, so why not just throw in the towel? I had managed to see every episode of Melrose Place, so why fight it?

  “MARK!” I heard Jeremy yell from above.

  How was he already back in the canoe? I wondered.

  I floated to the top and began bobbing up and down in the water.

  “Wasn’t that fun?” Jeremy asked.

  “NO!” I yelled. “Eating all day and watching reruns of Knots Landing is fun. This is torture.”

  “CLIMB BACK INTO THE CANOE,” Jeremy yelled.

  Glenn, who was sitting in the speedboat next to us, decided to chime in: “Use your upper-body strength to hoist yourself back into the canoe.”

  “Upper-body strength? What upper-body strength?”

  I put both of my hands onto the ledge of the canoe and tried to hoist myself up and back into it. Unfortunately, the only workout my arms had gotten in my twelve years on earth was from putting chip to mouth, and that doesn’t really build one’s biceps.

  “Come on, Mark, you can do it,” Glenn said.

  “Shut the fuck up,” I said under my breath.

  I pulled up with my arms and could not manage to maneuver myself back into the canoe. After about ten tries, it took Glenn and three of the kids on the speedboat to get me back into the canoe. I didn’t know if these kids were actually going to the MTV beach house, but thank God they were there and well-toned or I would have been a goner.

  Jeremy and I rowed back to shore and I immediately made a beeline to my only ally for miles.