Notes on Camp Cottontail Ranch

It was the last day of Camp Cottontail Ranch in the summer of 1987. Two of us joined forces to wander around the empty cabins. We were not friends or enemies, just two pre-pubescents killing time. I had been there for a month, but at the age of eleven it felt like a year. I was feeling light and airy. I was sensing the ‘fight or flight’ chemicals in my brain dissipating, for I was going home. I was no longer having to be vigilant against being singled out: for the past month, eating a bowl of cereal ‘wrong’ could be seized upon by my bunkmates. In such a scenario, a public humiliation would ensue, which could entail being called a ‘cereal fucker.’ Every activity was rife with negative potential under the guise of camaraderie in the great outdoors.

We entered a particularly messy cabin, whose residents were all off somewhere, likely forced into some activity because dead time at Camp Cottontail Ranch is the ‘devil’s time’. And perhaps that is why the devil found us at that very moment: within seconds of picking up a broken plastic toy from an unkempt bunk, a trio of bigger kids came in. To put it mildly, they were displeased.

The toy was in the form of a thin plastic rod with a T-Rex head at the top, whose jaw clenched when you pulled the trigger at its bottom. The magic of this contraption had been snuffed out before its time. The biggest kid of the three hooligans, holding an aluminum baseball bat, their Mussolini, yanked the toy from my hands. He was light blonde and freckled. He was wearing no shirt underneath a stone washed jean jacket. His pubescent ab muscles were on full display. After examining the malfunctioning toy, he spat out: “That was a gift to my friend from his sister! You fucks! You broke this!” Terrified, outsized and outnumbered, the other kid and I mounted our feeble defense: “The toy was already broken and we were sorry even though we didn’t break it. And we were sorry.”

This did not have the desired effect.

A week earlier, my friend and protector, Rip, had defended me in our cabin by deflecting a burgeoning verbal dog pile with respect to my habit of falling off the top bunk when I slept. It had happened twice already. Falling five feet in mid-slumber, at midnight, and into a hard floor, is not desirable or avoidable, as those bunk beds did not have railing. I survived both tumbles unscathed. Rip directed the mounting dog pile back towards the instigator, a corpulent kid named Cody. Cody was a soft target, as Rip had the confidence of Bill Murray in Ghostbusters. He had swagger. He seemed to have no stake in being the alpha, but could step up if the role was demanded of him. He called Cody a ‘Fudgepacker,’ which immediately triggered wide laughter within the cabin. I had no idea what a ‘Fudgepacker’ was, let alone a terrible slur, so I took it literally: he must have been hoarding fudge. I just was relieved the heat was off me. Shadow, our counselor, told everyone to knock it off. All the counselors had fake names. Gecko was the sailing counselor, Pony was one of the female counselors, Fable, a hippyish one, and so on. And there was Boss Bunny, the stocky thirty-something year old camp director. His name made no sense to me because he was not cuddly or funny or cute, but he was the boss, therefore he got to talk at us during camp wide meetings in his baseball hat, aviators, and shorts. I could rest easy—for now. Rip had averted disaster.

“We’re going to fuck you up for this!” blonde Mussolini snarled. He patted the bat’s tip with the palm of his sweaty hand. His lieutenants nodded in agreement. Their mealy-mouthed insults were muffled by the sound of blood rushing between my ears. Rip was not here to defend me! I could feel my guts twist as the kid next to me was visibly shaking. His knees hit the floor. I could feel my soul imploding. I felt the vast indifference of the universe, to me, an eleven year old, who had his whole life ahead of him. Blonde Mussolini pointed the tip of his bat under my chin as I tried to talk us out of our beating. I thought my life was going to end because I had never been beaten up before. I had seen some people getting beaten to death on television, which, in that world, only seemed to happen to bad boys and bad men. But this could not happen to me! If we had been beaten to death by three angry boys, and there was an afterlife, I would have wondered from there if I really was a good boy, or if this kid who died with me was a good boy, or if I died because he was a bad boy. Actually, I would think I must have done something wrong because why would the universe punish any child? But there was nothing that I did or said that deserved death by bat, let alone for picking up a broken toy at the wrong time and place (I could not speak for the other kid, though). If I was wondering all this in the afterlife, this implies there might be multiple lives, and that my last life’s mistakes could have carried over into this one. I learned early in life that some forms of punishment were meted out for no apparent rhyme or reason. Case in point: my father sustaining a massive stroke and being disabled, or my being born pigeon-toed.  Ineluctably, it seemed payment for a mistake in this life, or in another one, was coming.

I doubt they would have even thought to do this if they saw my tape collection, which included Run DMC’s Tougher Than Leather and the soundtrack to Colors. The bat would have stopped in mid-swing upon sight of this tape’s open liner notes, displaying the lyrics to Ice-T’s titular theme song. Ice-T was “OG,” and much more so than blonde Mussolini ever could be. He and his gang would have to apologize to us. They would have even offered to buy us new dinosaur toys for our inconvenience. 

But reality is reality: my precocious cultural interests did not truck with them, for the kid and I were convenient bags of meat for blonde Mussolini’s pleasure. Suddenly two counselors suddenly entered the cabin, Whodini and Jabber. They confiscated the bat and told the hooligans to leave. They made little attempt to comfort the kid and I, who were clearly scared and needed an avuncular pat on the shoulder. They instead said we should go back to our cabins or ‘find an activity,’ and that Blonde Mussolini was just ‘showing off.’ I felt a wash of relief to see the trio of hooligans expelled out the cabin like a noxious gas, but was disappointed they would would not be held accountable by an adult tribunal.  I wouldn’t come close to a beating for another 20 years, until 2007, in front of a taco truck. I got out of that one too. But that’s another story for another time.