for Carty Fox (1968-2004)

We had a band at fat camp. We called ourselves the Stretch Marks. We were four people who said, I am going to be in a rock and roll band, no matter the scale; and this was fat camp, so you can imagine the scale. That was the summer of 1985, a pretty forgettable summer in the history books, but for me, a chunky college sophomore from Poughkeepsie, it was the summer everything finally came together. I had my first real guitar, a cream-soda colored Stratocaster my dad found in a fire sale, and even though I had played every night in my dorm room that spring, it was obvious I was going to need more practice. I also had my first real love, a true knockout of a girl named Rhona Macanudo; it was obvious I needed a lot more practice in that department, too. That was also the summer I helped save a little girl’s life; but most of all, it was my rock and roll summer, and since those days I’ve become convinced everyone deserves one rock and roll summer, whether they want it or not.

Camp Catamount’s motto was A Trim Down Camp For Boys, A Slim Down Camp for Girls. This was the eighties, and ideas about weight loss were still a few years away from doing anyone any good; in those days, the diet plate was a hamburger patty with a scoop of cottage cheese on top. Skim milk was still something sick people drank, and diet soda tasted like battery acid. We knew absolutely nothing useful about food in 1985; the closest thing to a nutritional warning back then was the rumor that Mikey from the Life commercials had mixed Pop Rocks and Coca Cola in some unholy ratio until his stomach exploded.

My parents started sending me to Catamount when I was twelve, mostly because I was a fat kid, but also because I was a fat kid who got picked on a lot, and when they first put up the money for me to spend the summer sweating it out in the rolling hills of upstate New York, they pictured me returning to St. Raymond’s school after two months and strutting into the seventh grade like a pre-teen Jack LaLaine. I never did strut, but I did manage to lose twenty or thirty pounds each summer as a kid, and even though I always managed to gain most of it back by Christmas, that was enough for my folks to keep sending me back.

That summer of ’85 was my third as a counselor, and that made me somewhat of an old hand around that place. They put me and my buddy Jay Cantrell in charge of the Div. 4 boys again, and if you know anything about taking care of boys between the ages of ten and thirteen, you know it’s a thankless job. The only part of the summer Jay and I really looked forward to was the week before the campers arrived; in the mornings, we’d mix goofing off with cleaning our cabins or repainting the basketball courts, and in the afternoons, we’d goof off full time. In the evenings we’d take Jay’s decaying Pontiac Fiero out to the Schroon Lake Inn and sit at the bar, drink a few beers, try to put some desperate moves on the townie girls, and remind each other how last summer sucked, and how this summer was going to rock.

This is when the Stretch Marks got their start: one afternoon, a girl who worked in the mess hall walked past my cabin while I was goofing off on the porch with my guitar. I was hacking my way through Louie, Louie—officially, the hardest three guitar chords to screw up, but somehow I was doing it.

“Louie, Louie,” the girl said, propping a foot up on the porch. “If you slow it down, it’s the same three chords on Love Stinks.” The blank look on my face prompted her to strum the familiar A-C-D chord combo on air guitar. “You know,” she said. “The J. Geils Band? I’ve been through diamonds, I’ve been through minks, I’ve been through it all. Love Stinks. Love Stinks, yeah, yeah.”

I still had the same blank look, but I managed to nod my head and say, “Now you’re talking,” which was a trick I’d learned from my Intro to Lit teacher, Professor Melnick; every time someone in class asked a question he couldn’t answer, he’d nod enthusiastically and say, “Now you’re talking,” then turn to the board and change the subject.

She said, “You do know the J. Geils Band, right?”

“Oh, the Jay Geils Band,” I said. “I thought you were talking about the Fay Geils Band.”

She crossed her arms. “There’s a band called the Fay Geils Band?”

“Oh, you bet. They’re good, really good. Kind of a Poughkeepsie thing, though. Definitely a Po-town thing. You know Poughkeepsie at all?” Please say no, please say no, please say no.

“No,” she said. “I live a few miles from here, past Schroon Lake.”

“Now you’re talking.”

She sang another verse of the Jay Geils song while I followed along on my unplugged Strat. Then she took her foot off the porch and stepped back, squinting into the midday sun. She pointed her index finger at me like a pistol, pulled the trigger with a click of her tongue and said, “Rock and roll.”

“Now you’re talking,” I said. As she walked away, I finally found some courage. “Hey, what’s your name?”

Of course, by the time she turned around to tell me, I was already in love.

Rhona Macanudo played the bass, and it only took a couple minutes of hearing her warm up for me to realize the last thing she’d probably want to do is waste her time with a hack like me. I told her I knew a guy with a drum kit who worked with the Mini-Slim boys, and after a few near-misses of the three of us getting together, we cleaned out the storage shack behind the arts & crafts for an out of the way place to mess around. The floor flooded on rainy days, which could make holding an electric instrument risky business, but we didn’t have much choice: the owners of the camp weren’t too high on the idea of a band in the first place, but we were all good at our jobs, and we only got together in our free time. I was a counselor, so I knew I’d have the free time: these were fat kids, and if there’s one benefit from keeping an eye on kids who aren’t used to moving very much, it’s free time. We spent all of it in that cramped little shack, sitting on cases of industrial toilet paper and crusty gym equipment, beating the same half-dozen songs to death.

On drums: Frankie Palladino, who had his own kit since he was fourteen. That’s when the court-appointed doctor suggested to his parents that hitting the drums might distract Frankie from hitting the other kids at school. I knew him from our days as campers together; nowadays he was in charge of the Mini-Slim Boys, the small group of older boys who exercised and played sports together because they only had a few pounds to lose. At twenty-one, Frankie had mellowed a bit in his old age, but he still had enough of a rough edge to scare the hell out of the Mini-Slim Boys, and more importantly to Frankie, charm the hell out of the Mini-Slim Girls.

On bass: Rhona, the only one of us with any real talent. She worked in the camp kitchen, driving in every morning at five am with the rest of the mess hall crew to wash dishes and mop floors for six bucks an hour. She was nineteen, and with her dark green eyes and long legs, she was truly a stunner, but it was clear Rhona wasn’t bucking for Homecoming Queen: her long red hair was always tucked under a backwards Keep on Truckin’ ballcap, and her tired Wranglers had developed holes in all the wrong places. She wore the same three or four sleeveless tees that showed off the Cookie Monster tattoo on her right shoulder, and she usually had a cigarette in her mouth, especially when she was playing. Watching Rhona play the bass guitar – with her feet planted a mile apart, her shoulders hunched over, her eyes half-closed – made me realize I was always going to be a poser at this, a fake. That’s a hard pill to swallow for a boy who once ranked David Lee Roth first on his list of People I Want To Be Like, edging out Jesus and Bobby Sands; but just getting to watch Rhona play made up for it, I think.

On guitar: me, Daniel Cooper. I had been lobbying for years for people to call me Coop, but it didn’t take long to realize Coop was way too cool a nickname for a guy like me; I probably wouldn’t have known what to do with it. It’s clear to me now that normal people never come up with their own nicknames: for every Slash, Sting or Sid Vicious there are millions of Stinkys, FishLips and TubbaWubbas out there, playing the hand other people gave them. Back at college, I’d been dealt a real lemon of a nickname: Bean Burrito, probably because I was shaped like one.

That was the best thing about going to fat camp as a kid: ten months out of the year, people called you Flounder or Fat Ass or Bean Burrito, but for a summer, no one could make fun of your weight. It’d be like one drunk calling another drunk a lush at an AA retreat. Sure, everyone still got stuck with nicknames, but for once in your life they had nothing to do with your waistline: the dorky red-headed kid got called Torchy, the kid with the skin disease got called Patches, no big deal. Whoever said sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me, never knew a fat kid.

On lead vocals: Jay Cantrell, my best friend at camp three years running. That might sound like a good thing, having your best friend join the band, but it’s not. Rhona suggested holding an open audition; unfortunately, only three people showed up. The first was Mr. Mike Varrick, who’d been in charge of the horse stables at Catamount for the past thousand years or so. The old guy was definitely slipping, but he was so nice and so much a fixture of the place, it was hard for the owners to let him go. Every summer, his role at the stables seemed to get a little smaller, but when I was younger, he’d ride his spotted horse Mabel all over camp, letting the little kids pet her and the older kids ride her, hard, right across the soccer field. We all called him Cowboy Mike, and he was the real deal, a retired wrangler from New Mexico who once roped bulls and busted broncs in every rodeo from San Antone to Saskatchewan. But the years had caught up to Mr. Varrick, and now the younger kids had given him the name Mr. Bareback, not because he rode without a saddle, but because one morning, the previous summer, he showed up for the first ride of the day without any pants.

We held the auditions in the Large Rec, which usually held the aerobics classes and the Friday night dances. We had a table and some chairs set up in front of the stage. Mr. Varrick ambled on in the front door, five-gallon hat on his head and a guitar slung on his back. “Heard y’all need a crooner,” he said, raising a boot and propping it on a chair. Before we could say anything, he strummed his guitar and started into There’s a Tear in My Beer. It was good. It was more than good, it was beautiful, and the words came out of Cowboy Mike’s tobacco-stained throat like molasses. I loved it, I just couldn’t see Cowboy Mike wailing out on Breaking the Law or 867-5309/Jenny.

When he finished, there was a long silence. We didn’t know what to say, but it turned out we didn’t have to say anything at all, because Cowboy Mike just smiled under his broad white moustache and let out a big sigh. He slung his guitar back over his shoulder and said, “Thanks.” He tipped his hat and ambled back out the door. “See y’all out on the trail.” We all sat there for a moment, still silent.

The second candidate was an eleven year-old girl out of Div. 8 who got up on stage and sang The Good Ship Lollipop. The third, of course, was Jay. That morning, I had told him to come in with a lot of energy; Frankie and Rhona weren’t too keen on Jay fronting the band, so I told him he should go for broke up there to win them over.

Jay stormed into the Large Rec with a giant boom box swinging from his arm and immediately, he jumped right on stage. He made it, but the boom box didn’t; it caught the lip of the stage and smashed onto the floor in a few jagged chunks. I was furious; after all, it was my boom box. Jay took it in stride and launched into an a capella version of Van Halen’s Hot for Teacher, and to be honest, he was doing all right – the finger wagging, the ass shaking, the falsetto shrieking – right up until the cartwheel. The cartwheel didn’t go so well. Luckily, the cartwheel came at the end of the song, so if you weren’t paying attention it sounded like actually planned to yell “Aaaagh! Jesus!” to finish things up.

Jay rolled around on the stage in pain for a few minutes while we deliberated. We all agreed he couldn’t sing, but I made the point that Tom Petty couldn’t sing either, and look where he is. I know Jay didn’t have much competition for the job, but I didn’t want to let down my best friend, so I said, “He’s got a lot of energy.”

“Well,” Rhona said. “Better than the last one.”

Frankie put his head on the table and said, “Oh, my fucking head.”

That night, we were down in the shack, floating around names for the band. Jay paced the floor like an expectant father, deep in thought. He’d been in the band for five hours and already he was our Lizard King. “A band’s name should reflect their roots,” he said. “It should reflect where you come from.”

And so, after we tossed around a few names - Portion Control, XXXL, the Double Wide Trailers - the Stretch Marks were born.

* * *

Camp Catamount was a lot like any regular camp; every summer, we had our petty thieves, one or two substantial thieves, the bedwetting kid, the loudmouthed kid, the brooding kid, the my-dad-was-in-Nam-so-I’m-going-to-wear-camo-pants-and-an-army-jacket-every-day-even-though-it’s-ninety-degrees-outside kid, the hypochondriac kid, the oversexed kid; once in a while we got the sleepwalking kid or the imaginary-friend kid. The worst was the runaway kid. We got one of those every summer; there’d always be one boy who’d never been twenty feet from home before, and he was easy to pick out, because ten minutes after his parents drove off he’d stop crying long enough to announce to Jay and me that he was running away. They were the worst because if they did make a break for it, it was our job to go after them. That summer, our runaway kid was a stubby keg of baby-fat from Boston named Ricky Longo. On the first day, he told us he was leaving the next morning at the crack of dawn, and we figured he was serious because at lights out, he lay in his bunk fully dressed, backpack perched on his stomach. Since he was in my cabin, I earned the Dawn Patrol duty. “I feel for you,” Jay said to me. “If you want, I’ll trade your runaway kid for my Tourette’s Syndrome kid.”

“We’ve got a kid with Tourette’s in our Div?”

“Fuckin’ goddamn right,” Jay said.

As promised, at five am the next morning Ricky Longo slipped out of his bunk and stepped out onto the porch. I was already there, sitting on the railing and nursing a cup of bad coffee from the counselor’s lounge. “Morning,” I said. The sun was about ready to show itself.

“I’m running away,” he said. “Don’t try to stop me.”

“Stop you? Hell, I want to come with you,” I said, still rubbing the sleep from my eyes. “What do you say?”

He thought about it for a moment, then nodded. We started out, crossing the basketball courts, passing the infirmary and the office, then out onto the dirt road that snaked the three miles out to Route 17. This was the way it usually played out: we’d walk along until the runaway kid got tired of the whole idea, or got hungry for some breakfast, and we’d turn back after a mile or two. Ricky Longo turned out to be an okay kid; we talked about out favorite junk foods (Ricky: Sno-Balls, Daniel: Chocodiles,) about why Carl Yastremski would kick Don Mattingly’s ass, and about the nickname the other kids in the bunk had already pinned on him: Sweet Cheeks.

“That pretty bad,” I told him. “But try picking up chicks in college with Bean Burrito” We got back to the cabin about an hour before wakeup. Ricky promised me he was going to run away again tomorrow, and I believed him.

That afternoon we had our first official practice as the Stretch Marks. It didn’t go so well; we couldn’t decide on what songs to play. Jay showed up in white cowboy boots, gold stretch pants and a black fedora. He had complied a long list of songs that he refused to sing because they weren’t right for his vocal range. Frankie had made a list, too, titled Songs You Can Bone To.

Rhona shrugged thoughtfully. “I’ve always wanted to try a Who song,” she said. “The bassline on Happy Jack is crazy.”

“Sorry,” Jay said. “That one’s on my list.”

“Just as long as we keep it simple,” I said. “I need a lot of work.”

“Don’t talk like that, Daniel,” Rhona said, slapping my chest playfully. “You’re the best guitarist we’ve got.” I was already certain if she played her bass and my guitar at the same time while translating War and Peace into Swahili, she’d still sound better than me, but at that moment, I didn’t care, because I was too busy celebrating the fact that Rhona Macanudo just touched my chest.

“Hey, we’re the Stretch Marks, right?” Jay said. “Maybe we should do all fat songs. You know, like Fat Bottom Girls.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Anyway, isn’t that the only one?”

“That’s stupid,” Frankie said, scribbling on a crumpled napkin. “Check it out: I made a new list. Songs You Can Have a Threesome To.” We stopped him after he started singing Three Times a Lady.

That night, we met back up after dinner and put our first song in the can: Love Stinks, and I was happy because the riffs I was playing sounded great, chunky and sharp at the same time. When we finally packed it in, I asked Rhona if she wanted someone to walk her up to the parking lot. I admit, it was a dramatic thing to do, but I was twenty, I did everything dramatically. She said yes, and Frankie and Jay hit me with cold stares, like I just pissed on the Alamo.

The light in the parking lot was out as usual, so Rhona and I fumbled along the hoods and fenders of the cars in the dark. “I love watching you play,” I said to her. “I don’t know why you’re wasting your time with us. You should be in a real band.”

“I am,” she said, and I took it for granted she was still talking about us.

“Seriously, Rhona, you’re amazing. The rest of us play instruments. You play music.”

“Thanks,” she said; even though it was dark, I knew she was blushing. There was an awkward moment with both of us staring at our shoes, and before I thought to lean forward and kiss her, she was walking backwards towards her car, her hands digging deep into the back pockets of her jeans. “Hey, Daniel, you should come out to the Schroon Lake Inn tomorrow night,” she said.

“Is that a date?” Please say yes, please say yes, please say yes..

“It’s a surprise,” she said. “I think you’ll get a kick out of it.”

The next morning, I woke up in my bunk to a tug on my arm. It was Ricky Longo. He looked down at me impatiently and tugged on my arm again. “I’m running away now,” he said.

“Right,” I said, rubbing my eyes. I threw on some sweats and laced up my Pro Keds; I was hoping I could convince Ricky to start running away at a reasonable hour. At least the kid was getting some exercise. Together, we walked outside into the cool dawn.

* * *

Pitching an end of the summer Stretch Marks concert to the camp directors was harder than we thought. They clearly hadn’t forgotten the previous summer, when Jay and I came up with the idea of the CWF, or Catamount Wrestling Federation. We built a makeshift ring out of aerobics mats and old tennis nets, and we enlisted other counselors to dress up as The Lumberjack or Captain USA and beat the hell out of each other. Even Cowboy Mike joined in as the toy-gun toting Catamount Kid. The campers loved it, but the night took a turn for the worse when we ended with the Mystery Match: Jay stormed in as the evil Professor Pusher, with a white lab coat, stethoscope, and a shopping bag full of drugs. He started taunting the kids and throwing handfuls of pills at them. All right, they were only TicTacs, but it might as well have been PCP because in a heartbeat the place turned ugly, with boys and girls trying to tear Professor Pusher limb from limb. On cue, I burst in dressed like Nancy Reagan and got the kids to start chanting “Just Say No, Just Say No,” until the Professor suffered a massive heart attack from all the positive energy and had to be carried out on a stretcher.

This time around, the directors finally relented after we promised we wouldn’t last more than an hour, we wouldn’t do any songs about drugs, we wouldn’t do any songs about food, and we wouldn’t cost them anything extra. The Stretch Marks were set to rock Camp Catamount on the final night of the summer, and we kept practicing hard, rocking the pillars of hell, in between taking kids to the pool and teaching them how to hit a softball.

That night, I convinced Jay to switch O.D.s with me so I could meet up with Rhona at the Schroon Lake Inn. I had to run the customary gauntlet of best-friend questioning before he handed over the keys to his Fiero. Jay was a few credits short of a Psych minor at UMass. “When she told you it’s a surprise, did she actually say, ‘It’s a surprise,’ or did she say ‘I have a surprise for you?’”

“She said, ‘It’s a surprise.’”

“Hmmm,” he said, rubbing his chin. “That’s not good. Tell me this: when she said, ‘I think you’ll get a kick out of it,’ did she emphasize the word you’ll, or did she emphasize the word kick?

“Jesus, Jay, I don’t know - ”

“Do you want my car keys or not? Just answer the question.”

“She emphasized you’ll, I guess.”

“Well, it’s obvious,” he said. “The girl wants to fuck you.”

I got to the Inn around nine and it was almost empty. There was a band warming up on stage and a few regulars lashed to the bar. The only soul I recognized was Cowboy Mike, who was sitting at the bitter end of the bar with a beer in front of him. I waved a quick hello to him from the door, and he tipped his hat back. I suddenly realized I was wearing enough Aqua Velva to kill the elderly, so I stayed at the other end of the bar and ordered a beer, waiting for Rhona to show. I was excited to tell her about the Stretch Marks’ first gig.

There was some feedback from the speakers on stage, and then I heard the singer say, “We’re the Guggenheims, thanks for coming out.” When they dived into their first number, I stood up from my stool and faced the stage; they were playing a supped-up version of The Who’s Happy Jack. The singer was this tall guy, a chalky-skinned scarecrow with a newly shaved head and a Sex Pistols t-shirt; the guitarist was a short Asian guy with jet black locks and a fur coat; the drummer was in the buff except for some red boxers and a velour top hat. The bassist, of course, was Rhona, decked out in a red cocktail dress and stiletto pumps with these pink Elton John shades that covered most of her face. I almost didn’t recognize her, but the Marlboro in her mouth and the way she was standing tipped me off. When our eyes met, she smiled.

The guitarist launched into a screaming divebomb of a solo, his fingers flying across the frets as he crouched down and cradled his chipped Gibson in his lap like a dying lover. He was incredible; they all were.

Standing there, I suddenly felt foolish. For almost an entire summer, I made myself believe I was in a rock and roll band. I had convinced myself I was Coop, the cool guitarist with a rock and roll attitude. But now, I was face-to-face with a real guitarist and a real rock and roll band, and I felt silly. In a way, I’d been at fantasy camp all along, one of those places old men go to hang around with real baseball players or real musicians and pretend. Standing there, I knew the chance Rhona Macanudo would fall for a guy like me was about the same as the chance of joining Aerosmith because I could hold my own on Louie, Louie. I felt like a counterfeit Coop.

By the time they went into their next song, the place had started to fill up. I slowly melted back to the bar and hunkered down on the last open stool, next to Cowboy Mike. I ordered another Genny and kept glancing back at the stage.

“You look pretty low,” Mike said. “Girl trouble?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe it’s my name, Mike. It’d be a lot easier if people called me Coop. I bet if they called me Coop back at school, I’d have to beat the girls off.”

“Well, what do they call you now?”

“Bean Burrito.”

“That might be your problem,” he said, looking like he was about to laugh. Then suddenly he looked like was going to cry. He bent his head and stared into his beer.

“You look pretty low yourself,” I said to him.

He took his time. “I got some bad news today, Coop,” he said. “ Looks like this is my last summer up here.”

“What? They’re firing you?”

“Not fired, really. More like, let out to graze. Getting too old, I guess.”

“They can’t do that,” I said. “You’re Cowboy Mike.”

He smiled. “I was Cowboy Mike. To these kids, I’m just the geezer with no pants.”

We both sipped our beers, and I said, “For what it’s worth, I think that camp would be nothing without you around. It’d be like, I don’t know, Van Halen without David Lee Roth.”

Mike nodded, even though he probably thought Van Halen was a moving company.  He finished his beer. “Well, maybe they’re right,” he sighed. “It’s been a while since me and Mabel pulled our weight around here. It’s hard for a man to keep a straight face, knowing he’s not much good.”

“Don’t talk like that,” I said. “You’re plenty good.”

“Thanks, Coop,” he said, pushing himself up from the bar. He took a slim roll of bills from his shirt pocket and slid off a fiver to lay on the bar. “And son,” he said, “ can I give you a piece of advice? Next fella at that college of yours calls you Bean Burrito, you knock him flat on his ass. I guarantee you’ll be Coop from then on.” And then he was gone. I didn’t stay much longer myself. I drove back to camp and headed for my cabin. It had turned into a cold night; I could see my breath as I walked. Even on an August night, those hills got downright chilly sometimes, and on those nights, the mess hall cooks opened the kitchen late and heated up some soup an hour or two before the kids had to turn in.  When that happened, the word spread quickly, from bunk to bunk – this was still fat camp, and the most vital news was about food – so in about fifteen minutes the porch of the mess hall was swamped. Imagine three hundred husky children in a mass exodus, dropping whatever they were doing when they hear there’s soup in the kitchen. That night, I could see kids migrating that way, so I followed along.

I waited in line to get some soup. After a few minutes, I felt a tug on my arm, I turned around, ready to tell Ricky Longo he could runaway by his damned self. But it wasn’t Ricky; it was Rhona. She was wearing jeans and a cutoff again, and she was balancing two Styrofoam cups in one hand. With her other hand she motioned me to follow her.

“Don’t you have a show to do?” I said.

“Short set,” she said. “We were only opening up for someone else, anyway. So what did you think?”

“You guys rock,” I said, and I meant it. “Your guitarist knew his stuff.”

She handed me a cup of tomato soup as we walked. “I-Dog? Yeah, he’s pretty good.”

I-Dog? How could I compete with a guy who gets away with being called I-Dog?

“Come on,” she said, taking my hand, and I followed her up to the stables, one of the few spots on camp two people could find a quiet moment after sundown. There were the woods, of course, but if you went out there at night you risked the thorn bushes, the critters, and even more frightening, the chance of tripping over two amorous fat kids in various states of undress.

We sat down on one of the old plywood benches. “So, how long have you and I-Dog been playing together?”

“Only a couple weeks.” She started to laugh. “You’re jealous.”

“I’ll get over it.”

“You know, Coop, I didn’t join the Stretch Marks because I wanted to be in a band,” she said. She bit her lip. “I did it because I got to see you for more than ten seconds at breakfast, lunch and dinner every day.”

“Did you just call me Coop?”

She edged closer on the bench. “Yeah, you know - you’ve never looked like a Daniel to me. You look more like a Coop,” she said, resting her head on my shoulder. I could feel her warm breath on my neck. We kissed, and she tasted like smoke and tomatoes.

Take that, I-Dog.

* * *

When I started this story, I promised you I helped save the life of a little girl. It was on our annual overnight to the top of Lookout Hill, a few days before camp ended; there was a steady two-mile hike through some pretty thick woods, but once you reached the top, you could see for miles. We always teamed up with the Div. 8 girls to make it a co-ed affair; Wendy Church was in charge of the ten to thirteen year-old girls, and even though she couldn’t keep up with the kids on account of her weight and a bad knee, she ran a tight ship.

We made it to the top just in time to watch the sun set. The kids were all sitting around the fire, watching the long shadows creep across the valley below. Jay had just dumped an industrial-sized can of turkey chili into a pot when one of the girls keeled over, right in front of him. “Come on, my cooking’s not that bad,” he said, and the kids laughed. But in a second we knew this was no joke; the girl was out cold. Wendy came over and clamped her fingers on the girl’s wrist. “She’s diabetic,” Wendy said to me, then she pointed to one of the other girls. “Nikki, look in Jess’ bag for her shot, okay?”

“It’s not in here,” the girl said, already looking. “She must have forgot it.”

Wendy tossed through the backpack herself, then threw it on the ground. “Shit.”

“She’s not breathing,” Jay said.

“She’s breathing,” Wendy said calmly, with an authority in her voice that let us know that she knew a lot more about diabetes than we did. “But we’ve got to get her down to the Infirmary, for an insulin shot, quick as we can.”

Jay was twice as fast as me or Wendy. This was one of three times in my life so far that I took charge, and I said, “Jay, you book it back down to camp and get help. I’ll follow you with Jess here.” Wendy agreed to look after the rest of the kids. “She’ll be all right if you hurry,” she said, but that didn’t sound too promising.

Jay tore down the trail. Even at that speed, it’d take him a half hour to reach the bottom, and God knows how much longer to get someone’s ATV or Jeep back up the trail. With Jess in my arms, I started after him; I wanted to move quickly, but I didn’t want to trip on a rock and break both our necks, either. Honestly, I don’t remember a lot about the next hour; I remember talking to Jess as we walked, even cracking a couple of jokes and waiting for her to come up with the punchlines. I remember crying; after all, I was in charge of a little girl, and she was dying. I remember my arms finally giving out for good about a quarter of the way down. But most of all, I remember Cowboy Mike on Mabel, charging hard up the hill towards us, Mike’s torso slung low against the horse’s back and his hand slapping at her side.

“I’ve got her, Coop,” he said. “I’ve got her,” and he lifted Jess up and sat her on the front of his saddle, his arm roped tight around her waist. He gave Mabel a gentle kick. “Come on, old girl,” I heard him whisper. “We’re only halfway.” Mabel snorted and turned her head back downhill. I tried to keep up on foot, but in a few moments they disappeared down the trail. He ended up saving that little girl’s life; but in a way, I guess she saved a little piece of Cowboy Mike, too: suddenly, no kid felt right about calling him Mr. Bareback, and it took the camp directors about ten minutes to ask him to stay on at the stables, as long as he wanted.

* * *

The last night of camp came; we’d been in the shack almost every day, and we had about ten songs we could get through without a major screw-up. I had recovered enough of my bravado from that night at the Schroon Lake Inn to see this thing through. Rhona taught me the trick of taping the playlist to the back of my guitar; I also taped a sign back there that read in big letters, Don’t Fuck Up. Wendy Church had enlisted her Div. 8 girls to make a Stretch Marks banner out of bed sheets and fingerpaints at the arts & crafts, and Rhona had borrowed most of the Guggenheim’s sound gear. I really thought we were ready.

We took the stage fifteen minutes late, mainly because Jay had to finish loosening his vocal chords with a special gargle of honey and Alka Seltzer he found in Vocalist magazine. There was actually a pretty good crowd gathering in there; it was another one of those chilly nights, and a lot of kids had come in there to warm up. Jay ripped the mike off its stand and strutted along the stage, kind of like Mick Jagger with a leg wound. “How you people doing out there?” he yelled.

“We’re cold,” some kid said.

“Yeah, and you know what’s going to warm you up, people? The truth, that’s what,” and Jay started into a monologue taking down everything from Apartheid to the plight of the Canadian Snowy Owl, until Rhona stepped up behind him and kicked him gently in the leg. Jay put the mike back, pointed to the crowd and shouted, “Are you ready to rock?”

There was silence.

“Are you ready to ROCK?”

More silence.

“ARE you READY to ROCK?”

Finally, two or three kids half-heartedly yelled back, “Yeah!”

Jay pointed to me, and I raised my strumming arm high like Pete Townsend, ready to deliver the first three chords of Love Stinks. Just then, one of the kitchen cooks came up to the stage with an apron over his jacket and handed Jay a slip of paper. Jay opened it, shrugged, then moved to the microphone. “Got an announcement here,” he said, tossing the paper away. Rhona and I both tried to stop him, but we were too late.  “There’s soup in the kitchen. I repeat, soup in the kitchen. All right,” he said, turning back to us and flashing us a smile, “Let’s rock. One, two …” But by the time he hit three, the Large Rec was empty. Suddenly, we had the whole place to ourselves.

Frankie tossed one of his sticks at Jay. “There’s soup in the kitchen? What are you, stupid?”

Rhona looked at her watch and unplugged her bass. “Good show, guys.”

“Wait,” I said, feeling my moment of glory slip like sand through my fingers. “Let’s play anyway.”

“Forget it,” Frankie said. “I want some soup.”

And that’s how the Stretch Marks ended, twenty years ago: upstaged by soup.

Last I heard of Frankie Palladino, he joined the Navy. Jay and I still keep in touch, now and then; he’s been pretty successful directing local plays and working on some indy movies out in L.A. And Rhona, well, everybody knows how things turned out for her. Her band changed their name from the Guggenheims, of course, and they got about as big as you can get in the mid-90s – but they broke up when the singer’s head got too big. That’s what I read in the magazines, anyway. I also read that Rhona got really down on herself after that, and I always wanted to drop her a line and remind her of the really low times, those salad days of rock and roll in the summer of ’85 when she played in a band so bad, it lost out to soup.

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