Public Apology: In Which a Man Grapples With a Lifetime of Regret, One Incident at a Time

by Dave Bry

  I saw Becca standing at the edge of the circle. I tapped her on the shoulder and told her I was thinking of running away and asked if she wanted to come. She looked slightly concerned—she was always so nice—but said no, she was enjoying the bonfire. Jon, too, I asked. He thought I was joking. We were jokers with each other, me and Jon. I walked away and bumped into Geoff.

  “Geoff! Thank god I found you.”

  “Hey, man. What’s up?”

  “We have to get out of here.”

  “What?”

  “We gotta do something big. This place is bullshit!”

  “Yeah. Umm…”

  “This is bullshit! It’s like jail here. We need to do something big to let them know they can’t treat us like this. We gotta get out of here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Let’s get out of here. We can sneak out to the road and hitch a ride somewhere.”

  “Whoa, man. That sounds pretty crazy. I don’t think we want to do that.”

  “I don’t care about getting in trouble! We need to do something big! Don’t you want to be free?”

  “Are you okay?”

  I ran off and found a dark place under a tree with low, wide-reaching branches. I could see the bonfire back from where I’d come, a hundred yards away or so, and our cabin in the other direction, through a grove of pines, a little farther. I leaned my back against the tree trunk and stayed there for a long time, thinking desperate, paranoid, lonely thoughts. I didn’t understand what was happening to me, but had the strong feeling that I had seen some truth, discovered something corrupt and wrong with the world and that I had to do something big and momentous about it. To make some statement about youth and freedom and rebellion. But it was all so vague and confused. Very, very confused. It was all swirling in my brain. When I closed my eyes, I saw stars.

  After a while, I saw everyone leaving the bonfire. People passed me on the way to their cabins. I stayed quiet and hidden. Soon after that, there was commotion, and I heard people calling my name. Flashlights. Your voice.

  I came out from under the tree and heard someone shout, a kid, someone from our cabin. “There he is!” Then I fell flat on my face. Like a two-by-four. Without even knowing it. It was if the world just tipped to the side. One moment, I was standing on the patch of grass; the next moment the patch of grass was rushing up to meet my face. More shouting. “He fell!” People running toward me. “He fainted!” Your voice again. “Give him room! Give him air!” Then I was laughing hysterically. Then I was sobbing.

  You lifted me up. You and one of the other kids. But I couldn’t lock my knees. My legs were like Jell-O. I crumpled back down and kept crying.

  You picked me up and put me over your shoulder and ran me across the central field to the infirmary. The camp director met us there—Jay, with the big gray beard—and a doctor. The lights were bright inside; it was a blond wood room, and I was lying on a padded table. I stopped crying, but I couldn’t make sense of my thoughts for a while. I’m not sure if I could talk, or if I was talking, I’m not sure what I said. It might have been gibberish. It was clear that you and the camp director and the doctor were very concerned. You spoke to me very slowly. “Take deep breaths.”

  Dizzy and numb, I came back to myself after a while and sat up. I wasn’t in pain. My head was a little cloudy, but I actually felt pretty good. I didn’t feel like running away anymore or that the camp was an evil organization set up to oppress kids.

  The doctor asked me if I had taken any drugs. “No,” I said. I hadn’t. Ever.

  Had I ever had an epileptic seizure? “No.”

  They got my father on the phone and his voice sounded strange. “David,” he said, “I want you to tell me the truth: Did you take any drugs tonight?”

  I told him I hadn’t. And we talked for a short time before he got back on the phone with the doctor. I told him that I was feeling better now. He’d later tell me this night had been the most frightening night of his life. He’d had experience with psychological breakdowns before—professionally, involving some of his clients—and he knew that sometimes people freaked out and didn’t ever come back. He said he almost got in the car and started the eight-hour drive up to come get me. He didn’t because the doctor confirmed that I was getting better. But he said he didn’t sleep anymore that night. “It was terrible being so far away, not knowing what was going on,” he said. “I thought we might have lost you.”

  At the infirmary, drugs remained the main avenue of inquiry. Was I sure I hadn’t taken any drugs? Might someone have given me drugs without my knowing? Had I met and talked to a stranger? Had anyone given me anything to drink or eat?

  “Oh,” I said. “Yes, actually. John gave me a soda.”

  At the social in the dining hall. I had been sitting with a guy from our cabin named John. (Another John, not my jokeful buddy.) And he’d gotten up to get a soda, and—I forget whether he’d offered or I’d asked—he got me one, too. Either way, innocent enough. I had been friends with him the year before but less so that summer. He seemed surly a lot of the time. Or maybe just sad. Indeed, some people said he was into drugs. I didn’t know. That was a pretty common assertion for people to make about someone who seemed surly or sad—we were of the age when drug taking generally started, and the blanket bogeyman description of someone being “on drugs” was something we were hearing a lot from daytime talk show hosts and the president’s wife. I don’t think John dosed me with anything. That would be weird to bring, say, a tab of acid out to a party and surreptitiously put it into someone else’s soda. Crazier things have happened, I suppose. But for starters, if you were into acid and you had gone to the trouble of bringing acid to summer camp, giving acid to someone else without their knowing would be a waste of your acid, wouldn’t it?

  I spoke to John about it myself a couple days after it had happened. He said he didn’t do it. And he didn’t seem guilty or anything. But when I described to him how I’d felt that night, he said it sounded like someone had slipped me something. I don’t know. It’ll be a mystery forever, I suppose.

  After talking to my father on the phone and convincing you and the doctor and the camp director that I hadn’t intentionally taken any drugs, I slept at the infirmary for the night. In the morning, I returned to Gonzo cabin (the name becoming all too fitting, I’m sure, in your eyes) and everyone was really nice to me. I apologized for scaring everybody, for having you all out searching for me with flashlights after bedtime, but the incident was soon forgotten. I was fine.

  Better than fine even. The second half of that summer was terrific. I got a new girlfriend, most importantly. Her name was Michelle. (A different Michelle, not the jokey Jon’s sister. My girlfriend Michelle was in a different cabin from the girls I was friends with. As a further aside, writing this apology makes it clear that American parents should have chosen from a larger pool of names in the early 1970s.) Once again, you’d introduced me to her. Apparently, she had come to you expressing interest in me. I don’t know why. Once again, she was a year older than me. And she was tall and very pretty, with big round eyes and curly auburn hair that shone blonde in the sun. Her teeth were straight and perfect; she’d gotten her braces off that year.

  I had this yellow Brine Lacrosse T-shirt that I wore a lot that summer. It was emblazoned with the hilarious double entendre “Chicks with Sticks.” (Looking back, this was surely a girls’ lacrosse shirt. A fact that doesn’t bother me at all now, but one I imagine might have when I was fourteen. Either way, it was such poseur garb. I’ve never played lacrosse in my life.) But I was wearing it one day as Michelle and I were walking down the steps from the dining hall, holding hands, and a lady counselor I didn’t even know stopped us and said, “You two are a really cute couple.” That shirt became my favorite shirt after that.

  And again, like the summer before, once I had secured a girlfriend, much of the ensuing time was spent looking for places where we could make out. Michelle and I found a suitably well-hidden tree
house near the arts and crafts workshop. Immediately after dinner, the tennis courts were always empty; we’d lie down right next to the net sometimes. But these were often stressful, not entirely comfortable sessions, with too much energy put toward keeping an eye out for counselors and too much attention paid to the Swatch on Michelle’s wrist.

  Our problems, and those of Fernando and Becca and Geoff and Stephanie and the rest of us, were solved when the counselor of the girls’ cabin disappeared for a week. As seems more than obvious in looking back, as was apparent to us even then, this counselor was having some problems in her life. She was a large woman, deeply hippied out, always a burst of color in flowing patchwork robes and flowers and beads and head wraps and stuff, but also gruff and unfriendly. I remember her chanting and dancing around the bonfire one night in a way that tipped past groovy fun and into occult ceremony in its intensity. Her eyes were rolling back in her head; I was waiting for her to pull out a rooster and slit its throat. (There were a lot of Wiccans up in that area of Maine, I learned from the other Gonzo cabin counselor, Eric, who was like the tie-dye master at the camp and whose family were Wiccans, or “witches,” as he frankly put it when we were talking about Stevie Nicks one day. “I come from a family of witches,” he said. He said some of them even believed in magic potions and spells and stuff, though he didn’t so much himself. I don’t mean to impugn Wicca in general here, of course. It actually seems like a pretty nice religion, as far as religions go. But that lady definitely scared some children. Me, a little, for one.)

  A few days later, the girls told us that she had stayed out all night and returned to the cabin in the morning, after they’d woken up. She was the only counselor in their cabin at that point—another one had left after getting sick or something. She was in a bad mood, they said, and had told the girls not to tell any of the other counselors. They didn’t like her very much, and it seemed pretty clear that she didn’t like them, either, but she offered them a conspiratorial deal: “I don’t want to be here; I know you don’t want me here; keep your mouths shut and you get to sleep, or not sleep, in an unsupervised cabin.” She knew they’d go for it. What group of teenagers wouldn’t? But she also didn’t seem to care a lot. I don’t think she liked her job.

  We boys didn’t say anything, either. We wanted to tell you, if only just to talk to you about it, to get the gossip on this woman: Did you know what was up with her? Was this the craziest thing you’d ever heard? But when it happened again, the next day, when the girls told us that it did in fact appear that they had been left counselorless for the foreseeable future, we realized this was a situation to exploit.

  We made a plan. We wore jeans and T-shirts into bed that night and set our digital watches to beep at midnight, after you and Eric would be asleep. I didn’t even need the alarm. A mischievous thrill kept me awake until it was time, when I climbed down off my bunk and met the other guys in the dark. Without a word, we crept past your bed to the cabin’s door. I held my breath as I pulled it open—slowly, slowly, cringing at the squeak of the hinges—and holding the handle for a second longer than I had to once it had closed. Then after waiting for a moment to make sure we were clear—half expecting to see a light go on, to hear your voice—the rush of the cool Maine air struck us as we snuck off over the soft pad of pine needles.

  When we got to the girls’ cabin, we whispered our amazement that this was happening. It was a dream come true: our own clubhouse, free of adult authority, at just the time in our lives when this was becoming the most exciting prospect imaginable. We could stay up all night. The girls had hung tapestries over the windows, and we had a couple of flashlights for light. We could do whatever we wanted. We played truth or dare, of course. (Wendy on the explicit condition that she never be made to kiss me; I didn’t care.) And we went on spooky moonlit sorties around the camp, which we learned was crawling in the wee hours with skunks, which we gave wide berth, so as not to get sprayed and which I told Christina were called fish in English, so that she would point and exclaim, “Look…look! The feesh! The feesh!” in her shy Castilian accent. And we all had a good laugh at that. So I owe her an apology, too, I guess, for such an obnoxious and xenophobic joke. Even though we fessed up and let her in on it soon enough. And she laughed along, blushing but unhurt. Knowing it was all in young, dumb fun.

  My Michelle wasn’t there that first time. But I told her about it the next day—trusting her with the secret of why we were all so baggy eyed but euphoric—and when we did it again the next night, I met her outside her cabin and brought her along. So when Fernando tucked himself into Becca’s bed and Geoff into Stephanie’s, Michelle and I spread out a sleeping bag on the floor and spent most of the night that way. And the night after that. Michelle was less adventurous than Wendy had been the summer before. (It became apparent early on in our kissing sessions that my packs of condoms would remain very much unopened.) Still, I wasn’t complaining. I couldn’t believe my luck.

  Then we got caught. I forget how exactly we got caught, strangely. My memory must be hazier for the sleeplessness. I don’t think we were found in flagrante. And I don’t think we ever woke you as we slipped back in at dawn. Had someone ratted us out? Had a counselor from another cabin busted the girls? Had Jay grilled them and someone cracked? However it got back to you, you came into the cabin one afternoon with your nostrils flaring and ordered Geoff, Fernando, Jon, and me outside to the picnic table under the pine trees.

  “You burned me,” you said, shaking your head like you couldn’t believe it.

  You were mad in a way that I hadn’t seen you before. I’d seen you spaz out at other adults, at refs, arguing calls during camp soccer games; I’d seen spittle fly out the corners of your mouth while you shouted from the sidelines wide-eyed with rage. This was different. You were honestly, earnestly angry in a different, more serious way. And embarrassed. It could not have been good news to get from another counselor, or worse, from Jay, your boss. I’m sure you had been called to account yourself. But beyond that, you were hurt. You looked at me with a hurt in your eyes. A look that confirmed to me that you did indeed consider us friends, outside of the fact that you were my counselor at camp. Or that you had, at least. Because the look in your eyes also conveyed the idea that something had changed between us. You had realized a sad truth, one that I was semiconscious of myself. That there was something in the way of our being friends as friends, something blocking us from a pure friendship that transcended the fact that you were my counselor at camp. It was just that: the official component of our relationship, the fact that you were my counselor at camp. I had betrayed you, I had burned you, I had been unable not to burn you—no matter how kind you’d been to me, no matter how much you’d helped me, no matter how many girlfriends you had set me up with, no matter how much I liked you as a person even—simply because you were technically an authority figure. I had to burn you. Surely, to a certain extent, you knew this. Surely, in the back of your mind, you must have expected it. You who had taught me so much about ’60s rock.

  “I can’t even talk to you right now,” you said.

  And you didn’t talk to us, or to me at least, for days after that. Days that felt turgid and overripe with uncomfortable cohabitation and much less laughter in Gonzo cabin than there had been before—and I knew that it was I who had spoiled things. But you are a good person, and those long-stretching days let feelings heal, and during the last week of camp, you gave me the great honor of letting me lead my own session of the ’60s Rock elective.

  That afternoon, once the group had assembled, you gave me a nice, flattering introduction—noting that I was the first camper ever to assume such a role in the elective that you had created. I had taken the task seriously and devoted the day to the Rolling Stones, who had replaced Led Zeppelin as my all-time favorite band that year, and made a syllabus of songs to play and discuss. I brought a bunch of tapes—Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers, Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out!—and the Encyclopedia of Rock book that I had brought wit
h me to camp, and the big history of the Stones book with the red cover, and the one with the cover from Black and Blue, and we looked up release dates and liner notes credits. I remember we came to the conclusion that, as much as I wished it were otherwise, Keith Richards, who was my favorite Rolling Stone and personal rock hero, did not play the guitar solo on the live version of “Sympathy for the Devil” from Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out! It must have been Mick Taylor.

  But I was sure to credit Keith with what, for me at that point, might have been his most important contribution to the band and to rock ’n’ roll in general and what it all meant to me. In between song selections, I told the story of the famous drug bust at the Redlands estate in 1967, and how when the prosecutor brought up the fact that Marianne Faithfull had been found wearing nothing but a bearskin rug, Keith had replied, in front of a packed courtroom, “We are not old men. We are not worried about petty morals.”

  I still get a thrill from that quote, to tell you the truth. I still like the ideas it embodies. (Even as I approach the wrong side of the equation myself.) But looking back at that summer and at the way I put some of those ideas into action, I’m sorry to have put you on the other side of the equation, sorry to have let you down the way that I did. There were things I didn’t yet understand about friendship, and about trust and gratitude and respect. Things that I should have appreciated but did not.