The Unaware Audience

A couple of weeks ago, I contributed a guest-post to a series about doing crazy shit hosted by Brian over at The Cheek of God. The story I told there reminded me of yet another time where I pretended to be something that I was not for no real reason other than to do it. I almost hesitated to post it for fear nobody will ever trust me again, but, you know, screw it. So without further ado...

It was Friday night. I had made it this far, five and a half days since the previous Sunday afternoon when I’d first started the challenge. The idea had been conceived the week before and quickly codified into a wager. It had been Champ’s idea, most likely borne out of his annoyance with me.

“I bet you can’t talk with that stupid accent for a whole week.” he’d said.

“Aw yeh?” I said. Or maybe I said “Oh rayally?” Or worse, “Betcha ah can, mate.” I don’t remember my exact words, only that I made it clear that this kid was game.

The accent in question was a rather poor Australian that myself and a few of the other kids on the camp staff had taken to using for no apparent reason. No wait, there was a reason: we figured out that it annoyed Champ.

Champ. That was his name. From his short stature to his dark hair to his jacked-up pickup to his resentment of having his authority disrespected or disparaged in any way whatsoever, he was every bit the Napoleonic figure. Still, I didn’t totally hate him. And looking back, I confess I feel just a twinge of sympathy that he had to be in charge of a bunch of asshole teenagers.

But hey, nobody was forcing him.

Somehow, I ended up as one of the main figures in this game of accent annoyance, so it was to me that Champ delivered his wager. “I bet you can’t.” he’d said. Bitch, you just lost a bet.

It ended up being me and one other kid in on the bet, another guy my age whose real name totally escapes me now, but who we all called Fievel because he wore a hat just like the movie mouse of the same name.  They had the same hat and everything. The point of the bet was for the two of us to speak in those ridiculous Australian accents, 24 hours a day, for an entire week. Since there was a new batch of kids in camp every week, the bet started when the first group rolled in, and ended when the last troop rolled out. For the kids in attendance that week, their entire experience of Fievel and I would be as guys speaking with funny accents. So we decided that rather than just speaking like Australians, we would just go on and be Australians. I mean really, Australia vs. Texas - how different are they? We looked at a map and figured out what town we were from, dreamed up a bit of backstory as to why we were in the States. Conveniently enough, Fievel even had an Australian scout uniform. Our story was air-tight. We were good to go.

Did I mention this was a boy scout camp? Yeah. A scout is trustworthy.

We made it through the entire week with nary a slipup. Looking back, I can’t say for certain that we had all of the adults fooled, but most of the boys seemed to buy it. If any didn’t, they kept their mouths shut. The rest of the staff seemed to have our back when it came to verifying out story. Fievel and I briefed each other throughout the week re-garding any pieces of our fictional past that we had told anyone, just so that our lies would all add up into one great glorious mound of truth.

FIEVEL: So ah tauld thees keeds thees morning that our mum had a pet koala beh when we lived in Australia.

HOLMES: Oh yeh?

FIEVEL: Yeh. Sed we hed to laeve it at the koala beh pound when we moved to Texees.

HOLMES: Ah'll mike a note of eet. Oh, before ah forget, ah told some keeds that you lost a surfing competition to an Aboriginine keed named Terrence.

FIEVEL: Crikey! Whoy'd ah heff to lose?

HOLMES: Because you're a terrible surfer, stewpeed.

At one point, I got chewed out by one of my supervisors for something that wasn’t my fault, and had to chew back with the accent in place. I can now say from experience that expressing your righteous indignation in a voice that is not quite your own has a way of pulling you out of yourself. I’m not sure that Travis from Houston would have responded to a misplaced ass-chewing with quite so much volume, but Travis from Perth, Australia had no problem yelling back at his superiors, and didn’t really care if he was making a scene. Because the whole week was already a series of scenes, why not have one where the Australian guy gets pissed off? I hear those people have anger issues. They're descended from criminals, you know.

Friday night of every week was the closing campfire, our little way of saying thanks and so long to the people that had spent the week with us. The Sunday night opening campfires had a way of being subdued, what with all these boys being away from the comforts of home, some of them for the first time. But after a week in the woods, closing campfires could be counted on to be rowdy affairs. But that particular week, I felt a bit of melancholy. I had essentially spent the week lying to these kids and their adult leaders for no real reason. Yes, this story wouldn’t be complete if it didn’t have that word in it: lying. It had been fun, but now that I was about to send these kids back into civilization with false information in their heads, my conscience was making a pest of itself.

But then the campfire ended and whatever guilt I felt subsided along with its flames. The troops rolled out the next morning. Fievel and I won our bet, so Champ held up his end of the bargain by taking us out for pizza. We ordered two larges topped with pepperoni and extra Champ-is-a-loser sauce.

I went back to work at camp again the next summer. One week, some kid whose face I didn’t recognize walked up to me and asked, “What happened to your accent?” It was a shitty feeling. I made up something about how it had faded over time, been in Texas for so long, blah blah blah. I responded to a question about one lie with another lie. One fiction propping up another.

So with that, my career as Andy Kaufman came to an end.

This post is not about sex

So our beloved Governor Rick Perry, he of the slick coif who carries on the tradition of sporting cowboy boots with designer suits, has gone and written himself a book about the overwhelming awesomeness that is the Boy Scouts of America. Kickass! As an Eagle Scout and former member and employee of the BSA myself, I could also write such a book, though I imagine my account would differ from the gov's a wee bit.

Governor Good-Ole-Boy recently granted an interview to the New York Times wherein they appear to have spent most of their time talking about the book and about scouting. Of course, the gov had to field a few questions about the BSA's no-gays-allowed policies, and I have to say, I found his answers rather interesting. It's not that his reasoning is so compelling because it's not; it's just that it sounds as if the scouts have abandoned the tactic of defending their policy by saying that it's intended to protect kids from child molesters, undoubtedly because that line of reasoning has been shot full of holes. So what's the new argument Rick?

"Scouting ought to be about building character, not about sex. Period. Precious few parents enroll their boys in the Scouts to get a crash course in sexual orientation."

Ah, okay. So now it's not about protecting kids from predators, it's about protecting them from...well, from what exactly? From having to be anywhere near gay people? From information? Or rather, is it to protect parents from having to have their boys around homosexuals, where they might find out that they're, ya know, human beings?

Except the thing is, if scouting's not about sex, then why are the scouts making it about sex? Doesn't a ban that is based entirely on sexual orientation make the entire issue precisely, exactly about SEX?

Am I the only one who doesn't get it?

Lord of the Flies was no joke

It is a very chilling feeling to realize that the large group of children who were supposedly under your control and guidance have now turned their collective will against you.

I don't know what made me think of this. Perhaps it's the fact that I'll soon have not one but two boys calling me Dad. Daddy. Pops. Gimmesomeicecream. Whatever name suits at the time.

In the summers that I worked at Boy Scout camp, experiences like this were few and far between, but they did happen, and it always served to bolster my cynicism regarding humanity's penchant for mob rule. I'm a peaceful man, but goddammit, every time I think about some of this shit, I'm glad that every major city has a S.W.A.T. team.

Like this one time, I was leading a bunch of kids on a little hike we called The Death March. It was maybe five miles, so there was little chance of death, though some of the more rotund scoutmasters that came along for the hike sometimes made me worry that we'd have to deal with a heart attack in the middle of the Texas hill country. But this one time, as we were walking down a rather narrow trail, I looked down a few steps in front of me and saw a snake crossing the path. I stopped the hike to let it cross the trail out of our way, but as soon as the kid behind me laid eyes on our reptile friend, the battle cry went up: "Living thing! KILL IT!" The rocks flew like crazy, a fully-automatic murderous assault on this poor snake who just happened to be on the wrong trail at the wrong time. I managed, with my teenage voice, to bark out the order to cease fire in time to prevent any injuries, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't ready to just leave all those little bastards out in the woods to fend for themselves.

And then there was this other time that I was trying like hell to get this one troop to pack up their shit and get out of camp. As employees, we basically had off from Saturday after the last troop left until Sunday when the next week's troops arrived, so kicking people out on Saturdays was a highly motivated affair. Everything was going smoothly with these guys, everything that is, until the scoutmaster's son's backpack inexplicably fell open and spilled a hefty pile of porno mags onto the ground for all to see. And for some reason, the sight of those provocatively airbrushed covers lying there in the dirt caused all hell to break loose. Suddenly the scoutmaster and his son are engaged in a heated argument, other kids start fighting, another adult is yelling at some other kids, and all I can see is the minutes of my free time slipping through the hourglass. I think even then I knew that asshole was only pissed at his son because those were his mags from his private stash.

Oh and then there was the time that the chaplain came out to tell the kids some ghost stories. See, every week, we took the kids who were signed up for the wilderness survival class out to this spot in the woods to let them build their own little lean-to survival shelters and sleep in them overnight. We'd build a fire and sit around and shoot the shit until it was time for the kids to hit the sack, er, ground. And one week, our chaplain volunteered to come along to help. And gathered round the fire that night, he asked if the kids would like to hear a ghost story. Sure chappy, tell your little story. Turns out this guy had the ghost story telling skills of a hook-handed Irish drunk...which, truth be told, he was only one chainsaw accident away from being. A properly told ghost story will leave you trembling in your trousers. It's an art, I tell you. This guy scared those kids so bad that we thought they would never go to sleep. And after a while, their fear somehow morphed into some kind of strange little boy hostility, and in the middle of the pitch-black night they started a rock war! Which is exactly what it sounds like: a war fought with rocks. What is it with little boys and rock throwing? I did it too and I can't say why. Readily available ammo, I guess. It lasted all of maybe five or ten seconds before we re-instituted peace, and nobody got hurt, but those were some scary seconds.

Good times. I'm setting the conch down now.