Words and images by Matt Roberts

The diarrhea kicked in about a week before, but the dread had been going on for months, ever since my parents announced that they were going to spend July in Japan, where my father had been invited to participate in a medical conference.

My pleas to be allowed to spend the month at my grandparents’ along with my second-grade sister, Ann, went unheeded. No, as a third-grader I was deemed old enough to be sent to sleep-away camp with my ripe-old, sixth-grade brother, Dirk.

The night before we were to leave for camp, my parents decided to treat us to dinner at El Parador, a Mexican restaurant on East 34th Street. As soon as we got to the table, my father announced to the waiter in a supposedly hushed whisper that I am sure the people at the next table could hear, that I was suffering from diarrhea and should probably be served something mild. This was before the days of chicken fingers and kiddie spaghetti with butter, so I am sure I was just given a smaller portion of what everyone else was eating.

On the way home, bouncing on the jump seat in the back of a Checker cab, I felt like I was going to explode in tears or the runs, or both, but thankfully, neither happened.

The next morning my parents marched us onto a train at Grand Central Station with the instructions that we should change trains at New Haven, Connecticut and get on the Pittsfield, Massachusetts-bound train, and get off at Lee, a stop or two before Pittsfield, where we would be met by a man in a blue pick-up truck, whose name we were not given, because my parents hadn’t bothered to get it, I assumed. Regardless, I knew better than to complain. Whenever I pointed out the unfairness of a particular situation, it was invariably met with a response of “don’t be a bitter boy.” Besides, as my mother had told us many times, HER mother had been put on a boat at age two with her brothers to cross the Atlantic and come to America.

Did my parents hug and kiss us that day? I don’t remember. If they did, it would be the only time I can recall them doing so. As the train started up, I looked over at my brother who was staring stone-faced at the window.

When the train pulled out of the tunnel on Upper Park Avenue, light flooded the car, and I knew this was for real. Several years later in our English class, we learned about metaphor. The expression, “the light at the end of the tunnel” was mentioned as an example. It was meant to signify hope, better days, the successful overcoming of an obstacle. I get it, I suppose, but to me, every time I hear it to this day, it just connotes uncertainty and pain ahead.

Dirk and I didn’t have much to say to each other. Looking back, I have to imagine that he was as sad, bewildered, and angry as I was.

At one point, I felt something jabbing me in the ass. Dirk asked why I was squirming so much. I leaned forward and showed him the toe of a woman’s sandal that was poking through the gap between my seat bottom and the back. Dirk gave me the index-finger-across-the-mouth “shhh” sign, reached into his backpack, got out a Bic pen, and carefully and gently wrote the words, “Fuck You”, on the bottom of the sandal. We both had to stifle giggles. I knew perfectly well what the phrase meant: Dirk had taught it to me back when I was in first grade. Whereupon I promptly told our next-door neighbor, Gilbert, that the next time he got mad at his mother, he should just say, “Fuck you, Mom.” Half an hour later, our doorbell rang, and there was Gilbert standing with a bar of soap in his mouth.

After a couple more hours of sitting in silence, the conductor entered our car and announced that New Haven was the next stop. This was where we were supposed to change trains, however the hell we were supposed to do that; the pit that had been in my stomach moved up into my throat. Dirk quickly jumped up and pushed me into the aisle, and we hurried to the end of the car and waited. I was bewildered that everyone else stayed in their seats because my parents had told us that a lot of people would be switching trains at New Haven. Just ask an adult which train is the one to Pittsfield, they had said. We stood at the end of the car for at least twenty minutes. Apparently next stop didn’t mean coming right up.

When the train finally rumbled into the New Haven station, some of the other passengers started getting up from their seats and huddled with us in the space between rail cars. As the train ground to a halt, the exit doors on both sides of the train opened simultaneously. I glanced over at Dirk, who looked completely shell-shocked. Most of the passengers got out on the left: Dirk grabbed my elbow, and we followed suit.

We didn’t ask an adult which train was the one to Pittsfield, but when the new train arrived on the platform, a conductor hopped off, so Dirk asked him, “Is this the train to Pittsfield?”

“What does the sign say, kid?” he responded without looking at us, while pointing to a panel on the car, which did indeed say Pittsfield.

The final leg of our train journey was uneventful, but when we pulled into the station at Lee, there was no man in a blue pickup. We waited as the other passengers got into their rides to wherever they were going. “What do we do now?” I asked, but Dirk obviously had no answer. We knew the name of the camp, but that was it. No idea where it was, how far from the station it was. No contact name. No phone number. No coins for the payphone even if we had a number.

Dirk actually looked he wanted to cry, too. In the meantime, I kept trying to catch my breath and prevent whatever was welling up in the back of my throat from coming out. A blue pick-up finally made a wide turn into the parking lot. “You the Roberts boys?” (Looking back, a pretty easy deduction since we were the only ones there.) “I’m John – hop in!” Dirk opened the passenger side door and stepped back, the obvious signal that I was the one to take the middle seat.

Soon after we took off, Dirk engaged John in conversation. They really hit it off: Not surprising really. As my parents had explained to us many times, the first child tended to be outgoing and confident; I, as the middle child, was destined to be shier and was probably less likely to succeed. At that point in our lives at least, we were willing to live the life our parents had ordained for us, so I just slumped down in my seat and let their words criss-cross my face. Before too long, though, I figured I better say something or John might think I was ‘retarded,’ a term we used way too frequently back then. So I blurted out – out of nowhere – “Are we going to be able to see the eclipse this summer?” which like an idiot, I pronounced with a long ‘e.’ Eee-clipse. Well, at least John now knew I wasn’t a retard, just a clueless city kid. John kindly responded that he sure hoped so since he had been looking forward to it.

We dropped Dirk off at his village: “Pioneers.” A cool name. Dirk called out “bye” to me and that was the last time I heard him speak for a month, though I did sometimes glimpse him across the dining hall. I got dropped off at my village: “Iroquois.” I had no idea how to pronounce it, let alone what it meant.

I stared at my cabin in disbelief. I was horrified. Where in God’s name had my parents sent us? There was a big swastika affixed to the front of it for everyone to see. It was a few days before I got up the courage to ask my counselor what that was all about, and he explained that it was actually an Indian good luck/good deeds symbol that the Nazis had stolen for their evil purposes.

When I set foot in the cabin, my shock and anxiety went up a few notches. I had seen the movie Stalag 17 a couple of months earlier, and if anything, this looked quite a bit worse than their prison barracks. No lights, no electricity, no screens, no windows – just huge wooden flaps which, I would soon learn, had to be lowered very carefully unless we wanted to amputate our fingers — and which transformed the cabin into a dark, dank oven.

I looked at what passed for beds – two wooden slats with saggy canvas nailed between them. Miraculously, underneath one of the beds I spied my trunk that had been sent on ahead of me. At least IT had arrived without any hitches. It was a true survivor: my grandfather’s trunk from World War I. When we had packed it up in NYC, my mother had sighed and said it would probably be the last time it was ever used. As I was to learn 10 years later, she was sadly mistaken.

As the month in Iroquois progressed, I became inured to, though not enamored of, sleep-away camp rituals – being dragged out in the middle of the night to go “snipe hunting,” running through the fog that the pest control truck sprayed weekly in a futile attempt to kill the mosquitos that buzzed in our ears no matter how tightly we pulled scratchy army blankets over our heads. There was one exception however: Our village’s communal bathroom – inexplicably named the automat – was up a hill through an unlit path in the woods. Unfortunately, after “lights out,” when our cabin’s single candle was extinguished, our counselor liked to regale us with stories about the One-Armed Brakeman. After losing an arm in a railway accident, he apparently roamed the wilds of Massachusetts chopping off the arms of unsuspecting campers he found wandering in the woods. I knew it had to be malarkey. And yet. When I woke up in the middle of the night having to pee, there wasn’t a chance in hell I was going to walk through the woods up to the Automat. No matter how full of bug juice I was, I waited until the first light of dawn to tear up that hill.

Thankfully, sometime in the middle of the night during the third week, I heard our counselor get up from his bed and unlatch the door to the cabin. He stood in the doorway and let loose a splatter of piss that would have made a racehorse proud. I figured that my skinny stream wouldn’t wake my fellow campers, so for the remaining week and a half, I followed his lead and never again lay awake with a painfully swollen bladder

“Where’s all your stuff?” Mark asked me as I tossed my suitcase into the back of his vintage Pontiac GTO. “Oh, my parents had me pack up my grandfather’s old trunk with all my junk, and we had it shipped up.” Mark, my brother’s suite-mate at Amherst College, had kindly agreed to drop me off for freshman orientation at Hampshire College: He needed to get up early to Amherst, and Hampshire was only a few miles down the road. During the four-hour car ride from N.Y.C., Mark regaled me with stories of college life. I was glad for the company: it certainly beat taking the train or bus up, which I was to do for my three remaining years of college.

At one point, Mark patted my knee, “So Hampshire College, hunh? It’s an EXPERIMENTAL school. That means hippie chicks! I guarantee you’ll be balling your brains out by the end of the first week,” a prophecy which sadly did not come true that first week, nor any subsequent week during the entire school year. In fact, my lack of luck with the ladies that year earned me the sobriquet, ‘Matt the Walking Bummer,’ a nickname that stuck with me until it was supplanted by ‘Happy Pants’ and, yes, ‘Bitter Boy’ during my career as a marketing executive.

My first disappointment of Freshman year, though, arrived just a couple of hours after arrival, when I got to my dorm room and found that Grandpa’s trunk was nowhere to be seen. After a couple of phone calls and an expensive cab ride to and from the Post Office, my roommate and I were lugging the trunk up four flights when it occurred to me that I had no clue what I had done with the key to it. We borrowed a claw hammer from our RA and pried the clasp lock off, destroying it in the process. I assumed this finally meant curtains for the trunk. ‘Don’t be foolish,’ my mother said, ‘You’ll need it to bring back your clothes, lock or no lock.’

So it was that I found myself sitting on said trunk nine months later, waiting for my father’s secretary, Pat, to come pick me up and drive me home for summer break. Dad hadn’t wanted to take a day off from work; unfortunately, the day the campus officially closed for summer wasn’t convenient for Pat to make the drive either, so I had to hang around my now-empty dorm for a couple of extra days.

When Pat showed up she might as well have had ‘I hate having to chauffer my boss’s spoiled kid’ stenciled across her forehead. I totally understood her resentment, and I spent the first part of the ride filled with shame and embarrassment that we both had to be subjected to this. Fortunately, whatever barrier there was between us began to fall away, and we started talking about music, Watergate-era politics, and to my surprise, my father. Pat was a keen observer of human behavior and had a wicked sense of humor – quite a few jokes were told at Dad’s expense. Fortunately, despite our newfound bond and openness, she never asked if I got laid that year. Just as mercifully, at some point during the next 50 years, Grandpa’s trunk managed to disappear. I have a sneaking suspicion where I might find it though: when we cleared out the family apartment and moved Dad into an assisted living facility 10 years ago, we neglected to check the building’s basement storage room. If it is there, let it stay: I see no reason to retrieve it.