Review: Lutheran Summer Camp

When I was, I don’t know, twelve I guess, I went to Lutheran Summer Camp. I wasn’t Lutheran. I didn’t really even know what being Lutheran consisted of, or how it was different from being Catholic, the religion from which I was already in the early stages of lapsing. The Lutheran Church was about a mile from my house, situated inside the median strip between the east and west lanes of the highway, and my friends M and S went there on Sundays, which is why I was invited to go to Lutheran Summer Camp. To hang out with them.

I didn’t like Lutheran Summer Camp, though, in Martin Luther’s defense, this had mostly to do with the “Summer Camp” part. You know what it was like. It was summer camp. There were songs and lousy food and canoes and sporting contests. Solitude was frowned upon, which was vexing to me, because all I wanted to do was read. I probably did get more solitude than anyone else, because, as the only non-Lutheran, I was generally regarded as strange and was barred from all religious activity. But it wasn’t enough to make me happy.

I shared my cabin with M, S, and a bunch of sexually advanced, tanned, handsome, not very smart boys who allied themselves with the male counselors and spent the week engaged in apparently successful romantic conquests. A cabinmate I’ll call W, because I have no memory of his name, and the W stands for “Whatever,” spent the week passively tormenting the rest of us and boasting about his exploits with the prettiest girl in the camp. The torments consisted of challenging us to perform unpleasant acts, like sniffing a pair of old underwear someone had found in a closet or confessing our innermost thoughts. The exploits consisted of intense kissing and apparent partial nudity in the boys’ bathroom.

I don’t know why anyone with carnal access to the prettiest girl at Lutheran Summer Camp would propose the boys’ bathroom as a meeting place, but that’s what W did. There, he apparently got her shirt off. I know this because he returned to the cabin to tell us all what had happened, and uttered a sentence that still enrages me today: “Her tits…they smelled like piss!”

Never mind that they probably didn’t. That the piss smell, if real, was probably emanating from the toilets, or from W’s own crotch. The thing that angered me, even then, was that this thoroughly undeserving person had been given access to breasts, and that he had come back to the cabin and insulted them. I vowed that if I were ever allowed visual and/or tactile contact with breasts, I would respect them. And if moved to share my experiences with others, I would have nothing but good things to say.

I did kiss a girl for the first time that week. I didn’t like her much. She was very peculiar, even more so than I was. She passed me a lot of flirty notes bearing the saluation “high john.” I wasn’t given the opportunity to respect her breasts.

One and a half stars.

★ ½