S u m m e r   o f   S m i t t y

We didn’t sleep until after the fire trucks drove over our camp site, until after the park ranger called the cops, until after the hotdogs came bubbling back up our throats. That night—that summer—would change all of us forever, but we were too young and too stupid to care.

***

We sat in a half circle round the campfire, corralled inside a close ring of olive-drab boy scout tents. There was eight or nine of us in our pack, but I don’t remember all their names. We were hopped up on Yoohoos and dime store wieners, trying to make each other puke by telling raunchy stories. By sunrise we’d be tasting those hotdogs in the back of our throats.

All our stories had struck out. Bases were loaded and there was one kid left in the lineup: Smitty Berger. The shy kid with the Velcroed shoes. Never talked. He was the kid who wet himself in the middle of fifth grade class ‘cause he was too chicken to raise his hand. He’d eat anything you’d give him, too. He had some kinda problem that made him wanna stick things in his mouth. He ate bits of junk off the floor like a toddler, and shag carpet was his all-you-can-eat buffet. His mouth puckered like a guppy as he slid random crap into it. He had no lips, just a little round hole that always hung open. A Mr. Bill mouth made out of Spaghettios. On quiet class days you could hear it whispering air.

Rumor has it that his older sister, Donna, narced on him for drawing profanity with their mother’s good china markers. Next day, her pet hamster mysteriously disappeared from its aquarium house. We didn't see Smitty at school for a while after that. Probably holed himself up at the hospital, crapping out worms and getting his stomach pumped.

Rumor has it that some football dipshits pulled shenanigans on him in our middle school locker room. They passed around an empty Dole fruit can and took turns peeing in it while one of them held him down. They filled it to overflowing, all warm and yellow like hot orange juice concentrate, then burned Smitty’s throat sour with it. Mother Nature’s napalm.

Rumor has it that his old man, Sergeant Berger, locked him in the backyard chemical shed for refusing to take his Sunday bath. They said he was in there for so long he went mute and his hair turned white.

Smitty’s old man went psycho just after Smitty was born. His brain wired itself backward while he roasted Orientals overseas. He watched his platoon buddies get blown to soldier bits in the rice paddy fields. He survived, alone in a hole in the mud, until the Victor Charlie were hosed down and he was rescued. He came home a decorated coward. Nobody talks about the boys who marched in with napalm tanks strapped to their backs, guns puking liquid fire—guys like Sergeant Berger. Nobody talks about what soldier bits taste like cooked over a chemical fire, served over hard rice. Smitty’s old man came back too proud to get help for the shell shock, so he drank the ghosts away instead. He used to say that a man needs to hit rock bottom before he’d any right to complain.

So, Sergeant Berger locked his only boy in that POW chemical shed for insubordination. They say Smitty survived on spiders and old gasoline. He didn’t die from drinking gas ‘cause it had been rotting in the heat. The water part separated from the fuel part, so all Smitty had to do was smooch the surface with his guppy mouth and skim the top. You could probably drink skimmed gas for a while before it turned you all the way retarded.

So, all eyes were on Smitty, the final kid in the lineup, about to tell his raunchiest story. We knew he wasn’t gonna say anything, ‘cause he never did, but those hotdogs churning in our guts weren’t gonna puke themselves. Smitty woulda been sweating bullets if it weren’t for his defective glands. Damnedest thing. Coach would make him run laps for sucking his thumbs and the kid would be baking in the sun, dry as a bone. He sweated through his tear ducts like those lizards that shoot blood from the corners of their eyeballs when you pick them up.

Smitty sat next to the campfire, sucking his fingers white. So, the kid next to him shoved him to his feet. Smitty stood there with his knock-knees mashed together, blinking his little pink hamster eyes. His shoe had one of those thick platform soles, but somehow he was still lopsided. His tighty-wities flopped out over the waistband of his shorts. They were so old the fruit guys on the tag either died or jumped ship. The bottom edge of his yellow midriff baseball tee creased the baby fat above his navel, its faded ironed-on face of the Bionic Woman stretching loose and saggy across his sunken chest. He had to wear his older sister’s hand-me-downs as she started filling out.

Donna Berger was almost old enough to go to school with the kids who smoked under the bleachers during lunch. Almost old enough to wear black rock and roll tees with the necklines and sleeves cut off.

Donna had a rousing growth spurt over the span of that summer. She’d graduated from the junior’s to women’s department almost overnight. Graduated with honors. Valedictorian. Summa cum laude. We couldn’t help but take notice of the battles she waged against her closet of shrinking shorts and tops.

The Bergers had a weedy patch of a backyard surrounded by a privacy wall. A brick one with fancy wrought iron spikes marching along the top. On the other side of the wall was a vacant lot bristling with wild blackberry shrubs. The thorny, spiky kind.

Every weekday afternoon, after school, from 3:45 to 4:05, Donna would cram into her junior girls two-piece bathing suit from the previous summer and soak up the suburban radiation. She’d melt into one of those plastic jelly beach chairs while the sun blasted her through the ozone layer.  For her, every weekday afternoon came with the challenge to do this one trivial but liberating twenty-minute act of defiance before her disapproving old man came home from work.

When the rumor of Donna’s one-woman show drifted into our circle, one kid sacrificed himself for the team. His hell-bent contribution would make him a legend. Like bubble gum baseball card legendary. For four days straight, after school, this kid tunneled through the thorny brambles with his pocket knife and scrape-scrape-scraped at the mortar between the bricks on the backside of the Bergers’ security compound like the guy in that Alcatraz prison movie. On his knees, he scrape-scrape-scraped until one eye-level brick came loose. He’d carved us out a VIP front row seat to the greatest show on Earth.

On the fourth day he marched out of those thorn bushes with his chest out and his arms and face scratched all to hell, belting that most-revered of hoochie coochie songs: There’s a place in France where the nekid ladies dance, there’s a hole in the wall where you can see it all…

So, every weekday afternoon we’d sprint five blocks, straight from our bus stop to the afterschool peepshow. 3:44 sharp. Probably right as Donna was wrestling her teeny-weeny bikini into submission.

Her old man came home from the mall at 4:07 pm, everyday. On the button. We set our watches to it. That twenty-minute window gave us roughly three minutes each, alone at the brick-shaped peep hole. On your knees, doing whatever you wanted for three whole glorious minutes, like you’re in a prison confession booth. Just slide the brick away, say your Hail Donnas, and hold on for the religious experience.

Hail, Donna, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blossomed art thou among women and ripened is the fruit of thy bosom. Jesus!

Amen, say it again.

We’d line up next to that hole in the wall in order of who ran there from the bus stop the fastest. Crouched between the bricks and the thorn bushes, with scrapes all up and down our arms and legs and faces. Until you were up to bat, you’d look away and wait your turn. Everyone stared at their watches, especially the second kid in line. His job was to make sure the one at the peep hole didn’t try to steal extra time.

When Donna finally peeled herself from the sticky chair plastic with her teenage flesh sparkling in the heat and her backside creased like an undercooked grilled chicken, that left us about two minutes to plug the hole and run the brambled gauntlet to freedom before Sergeant Berger painted black streaks on the driveway with his Ford Econoline.

Smitty got off at the same bus stop we did. With his platform duck foot and his knees knocking together, he couldn’t keep up with the rest of us. But he knew about our extra-curricular activity. We said we’d pound him if he ever narced to his sister. He didn’t.

Or, maybe he did. Maybe Donna knew she was being ogled like a slab of deli meat and soaked up the limelight just like she did the afternoon cancer rays. Sprawled out in that beach chair like she was posing for the undies section in the Sears Catalog.

The scrapes all up and down our arms and legs, we could hide under jackets and jeans. But we were too young to blame the ones all over our faces on pimple popping. The combined gasps of all of our mothers, when they noticed their immaculate little boys bearing the scars of prepubescent rites of passage, sucked a big fat hole in the ozone layer above our nondescript middle-American suburb. They strong-armed the PTA into hiring a company to dump sodium arsenite concentrate on the vacant lot, exorcising the neighborhood of the blackberry infestation from Hell. Arsenic pesticide compound. More toxic than the chemicals in cans of furniture varnish with the IF SWALLOWED DO NOT INDUCE VOMITING warning on the label.

The lot became a desert and nobody was allowed to build anything on it ever again. You could smell the cancer in the faucet water for a long time after that.

After the incident pulled the plug on our afterschool special, we found that our weekday afternoons had became wide open. So, we all joined the boy scouts. Even Smitty. When his old man found out, he said that the boy scouts was just like the army, but for boys who grow up to be faggots and pussies.

Sergeant Berger had a furniture repair kiosk in the mall, ‘cause that’s really all he could do after coming home from the jungle with his brain wired backward. You’d cart your old lady’s scuffed up gossip bench through the half-mile of mall promenade and he’d have it varnished up by the time you choked down your giant mall-pretzel. The kind with the salt bits the size of water softener pellets.

Smitty stunk like he’d been locked in his old man’s chemical shed all summer. Like rotten apples dipped in battery acid, same as his tent. Our fearless scoutmaster never said anything to him about the chemical stink all weekend. Didn’t say nothin’ to any of us. Mr. Fearless holed himself up in his 1970 Ford Pinto while a pack of preteens armed with pocketknives stoked a pinecone bonfire during the worst drought in state history. A couple times a day he’d crack the driver-side window and chuck Old Milwaukee cans out onto the ground where they splashed and made our campsite smell like a pack of dogs marking their territory.

So, Smitty stood there with his hands shoved down the back of his shorts. Somebody kicked him—not hard—just so he spun to the side so we could take a peek at his rear. Something big and wet bulged back there, and his hands fished around and fondled it. We howled like banshees as he stood there with his back to us, fingering his load.

Then Smitty did an about-face. The tip of his tongue wormed in and out of its Spaghettio hole as he sucked it white.

One kid told us to shut up ‘cause he’s about to say somethin’.

Another kid asked him if he’s gonna say nothin’ or what.

Then somebody yelled for us to lookit his leg ‘cause somethin’s drippin’ down it.

Sure as sin, something wet dribbled out of his shorts leg. Something brown. Then one of Smitty’s hands lifted out of his rear in slow motion. It was brown too. And I shit you not, he swiped his pudgy, wet fart-fingers under his pug nose and took a big whiff. Scout’s honor.

Our guts were on fire from laughing so hard. Until somebody yelled for us to lookit his other hand.

Smitty’s other hand, the one still fishing round his rear end, slid out. It gripped something brown and shiny and wet.

Not a turd.

A gun.

Smitty, that pudgy, pale devil silhouetted by pinecone flames—the kid who hauled his school books around in a brown paper grocery bag—the kid with the flesh-colored, plastic snails with the wires trailing from his ears—that kid—had a gun. A big, black, shiny pistol gun.

His pink hamster eyes sparkled as he choked the handle of his gun like he’d never held a gun before—‘cause none of us ever had. He was Sergeant Berger’s little soldier boy. Nobody was laughing anymore. Some of us never laughed again. Without having said a word, Smitty had just hit a home-freakin-run, and the rest of us were tasting hotdogs in the back of our throats.

Smitty was gonna blow us away for all the pranks we pulled on him that summer: For shooting Polaroids of him taking a dump under the gym bleachers. For filling his Thermos with storm drain water and mashed bug bits and spittle; he turned blue on the floor of the school cafeteria. Go figure, the kid who guzzled gasoline almost keeled over from bug water.

The gun made a noise, and we all flinched. It wasn’t the Dirty Harry cop cannon kinda noise you’d expect. More like a drowning baby bird. The kid closest to Smitty yelped like a girl and rubbed his eyes. Another drowning bird noise had the rest of us smelling like some perverted chemical cocktail of varnish and gasoline, like we’d been rolling around in Smitty’s tent.

The gun leaked brown discharge down Smitty’s arms and soaked his Bionic Woman t-shirt. By the time we realized it was a squirt gun some of us were already dead.

The kid who got shot in the eyes called Smitty the F-word, then charged at him, his arms cranking like a windmill. The rest of us watched as his chemicaled eyeballs swelled shut and went blind. He stumbled through the edge of the campfire, kicking up a whirlwind of embers. He made noises like a sick dog as he went AWOL through a gap between the tents. He was one of the lucky ones that night.

Embers swarmed onto Smitty’s soaked body, and he lit up like an old cleaning rag. His head was a science project volcano made out of papier-mâché and Elmer’s glue as fire belched from his mouth. To this day I swear to God I heard that hole in his face crying for his mom as his skin melted.

Smitty’s mom, Bernice Berger, made him join the boy scouts to keep him from his old man.

On Sunday mornings the old man would drop her and the kids off at church. Then he’d go park in the empty lot of the American Legion down the street, choking down giant mall-pretzels and yellow piss-beers until he decided it was time to haul his Berger brood back to the homestead.

By that many beers, the ghosts came screaming back from that shit hole jungle overseas.

By that many beers, Donna was a wayward trollop who’d end up as one of those middle of the night visits by a forlorn uniformed officer: “We regret to inform you, sir, madam, that your daughter is dead. Your unruly little slut OD’ed on pills before opening the veins on her wrists behind the grease barrels at the Roy Rogers.”

By that many beers, Smitty was a cancer that rotted for six months inside his insubordinate whore of a mother. A mute albino man-baby. A plump, bacon strip, underwear shit stain on the long line of proud Bergers who’d come before him.

After church, Sergeant Berger would stumble up the front porch steps and jimmy his belt off. Mrs. Berger fed him more beers until he forgot he still resented the kids. By that many beers, he could only focus on the whore standing in front of him.

The kids would slink to their room where Smitty yanked the plastic snails from his ears to silence the awful sounds that always came after.

Next day, Sergeant Berger would come home from the mall with a department store box. A long-sleeved top to hide the black and blue along his wife’s arms. It was his own sicko, brain-wired-backward way of putting things right. We all thought Smitty woulda ended up snuffing his old man one day, if Mrs. Berger hadn’t beat him to it.

Bernice shielded her kids from the cruelty the best she knew how. The kind of cruelty only conceived of in war. The kind that men bring home with them from foreign jungles. It fills you to overflowing and wires your brain backward until you’re a hollowed-out machine. You’re shipped out, dropped in, and extracted before you find out from the newspaper headlines what they made you do over there. And you’d sign up to do it all over again, for God and country, if they asked you to.

Donna might've been spared the side of a milk carton if she'd made it past middle school. Smitty’s odds of survival were always a hundred to one. Smitty wasn’t born for this world, and the world wasn’t made for people like Smitty.

One side of the squirt gun puffed out like herniated skin. It made the sound of a dying tea kettle, then went nuclear in Smitty’s hands. Hot chemical lava splattered us, spattered Smitty, splattered the dry cotton canvas tents—everything stained brown and burning. Homemade napalm. Liquid death.

For that split second Smitty was Sergeant Berger—his old man hosing down the Victor Charlie while his soldier buddies pickled in his guts. In that foreign land of fire and death everything becomes clear after your brain wires itself backward. He’d earn that Medal of Honor or be damned.

Smitty’s tent, packed with canteens and Thermoses overflowing with varnish, lit up like the Fourth of July. Sticky burning bits of canvas fabric and sleeping bag and saggy-chested midriffs rained down and glued to our skin. Kids were crying and wetting themselves and stop-drop-and-rolling on the ground trying to rub out oily fire that kept burning no matter what, all of us corralled inside a ring of tent fires.

By sunrise it started raining. It rained sideways from pressurized hoses while the forest lit up with flashing red lights. We were hauled out on stretchers and shoved into the back of trucks, even the kids who’d turned black and had stopped crying.

They found Smitty standing in the mud with his hands melted together in a wad of black plastic. He was dead, just standing there on his black duck feet with his knees knocked together. They tipped him over and hauled him out with the black kids. No Medal of Honor. No boy scout merit badge. A decorated coward, like his old man before him. Smitty ended up as one of those middle of the night visits by a forlorn uniformed officer: “We regret to inform you, sir, madam, that your son is dead. Your defective shit stain retard popped his cork and torched his entire platoon before eating their boy scout bits.”

Next day, Tabloid Times ran the front page headline: “Blind Kid, Scoutmaster Save Campers From Albino Fire Devil.”

Nowadays, nobody talks about it. Like none of it ever happened. Nobody except for the four of us who’re left of our pack. We still taste hotdogs in the back of our throats whenever one of us mentions camping or varnish or Smitty. Sometimes we get together over beers and talk about how the neighborhood became a ghost town after government letters showed up in all of our mailboxes. They said there was poison in the water supply and that we should all move out, no questions asked. Sometimes we talk about our neighbors who stayed, and how a lot of them all got cancer at the same time.

We talk about how Bernice became a hollowed-out machine after Smitty died and Donna ran away from home, and how she burned down the Berger homestead with Sergeant Berger still in it.

But mainly we talk about that one night when Smitty's brain wired itself backward. We drink beers and we talk about our summer of Smitty.