by Mamrie Hart
While it may take me a long-ass time to fall asleep at night, once I finally drift off, I am out. I apologize to any future partners or roommates who live with me, because if there is a fire, our asses will be burnt to a crisp. An intruder? It was nice knowing you. This bitch can sle-e-e-ep. Unlike my mom.
Don’t worry, this isn’t the part of the book where I divulge my mommy issues. My mother happens to be an adorable southern woman who is a loving grandma and makes a mean Crock-Pot of pinto beans. She also happens to be a severe insomniac. Ever since I can remember, she has taken hard-ass drugs to be able to fall asleep. If for some reason she runs out while the pharmacy is closed for a three-day holiday weekend, she does not sleep for three days. It’s an actual waking nightmare. So the last thing I want is to love me some sleeping aids and then not be able to sleep without them. Although, it does provide for some great stories.
There’s a witching hour when my mom’s sleep meds kick in, but not enough to knock her out. This is the closest I’ve ever come to seeing my mom high. She usually just saunters around in her little robe, watching TV and doing the whole “I’m not sleeping; I’m resting my eyes” routine. You know the one. You and a friend are watching a movie, and to make it appear like you aren’t falling asleep, you throw in an occasional laugh or “mmhmm.” One time, my mom did this, but she laughed and said, “Oh, those Polacks!” I don’t remember what we were watching, but I do know it had nothing to do with Polish people. And that is the moment I learned of my mother’s burning racism for Polish people.*
The best witching-hour story is “The Night of the Choco Taco.” Picture this. It was 2003. I was a sophomore in college who only lived two hours from home; so, every couple of months I would make the drive to get a home-cooked meal and watch cable. At around “pull out my hidden bottle of wine, my mom is asleep” o’clock, I heard the mom-shuffle. Sure enough, she rounded the corner in her robe and slippers with a cup of hot tea.
Caroline joined me on the couch to watch Iron Chef. As she sat down, she immediately spilled her hot tea all over herself. While I was worried she had burns from the scalding hot water, she was cracking up.
“I’m gonna fix me another cup,” she said, and walked out of the living room, laughing like we were watching a Dave Chappelle special.
“Grab some paper towels!” I yelled after her as I went back to my beloved Food Network. A few minutes later, just as the chairman was about to announce the winner, she was back. She handed me the paper towels to help her wipe up the spill, but before I could get it off the floor, I looked back at her. She was eating something.
“Mom, what are you eating?” I asked.
“What does it look like? It’s a choco taco.” The woman was eating a taco shell filled with chocolate ice cream and topped with sour cream. Yep, an actual taco shell. Tell me that ain’t some straight-up stoner shit right there.
The best part is the next morning, she was dead set that my stepdad ate all the chocolate ice cream and didn’t leave her any. ’Cause that’s right, folks, some sleep meds make you sleep-eat. That’s the last thing I need. And this is coming from a girl who once got high and ate Funyuns dipped in butter.
Sometimes my mom being on sleep meds was a major advantage for me, especially in high school. During my senior year, we had one of these incidents. I had a humongous exam on Hamlet for my AP English class the next morning, and while I should have stayed in and studied (like any of you reading this who are still in school should do), I had other plans. Our neighboring county didn’t have school the next day, so my friend Ashleigh and I headed over the bridge to a house party. Not the wisest choice, but we figured we’d socialize for an hour or so and be back in time to study for the final.
Once we got there, it was a full-on house party. Ashleigh wasn’t drinking, since she was driving, so when the party ran out of mixers, she volunteered to do a grocery store run. By the time she got back, the scene was a lot different than before. . . .
ASHLEIGH
Mamrie, what the hell are you doing?
I’m sitting at a table across from George, a six-foot-four-inch lumberjack of a man. Empty shot glasses covered the table and people cheered around us.
ME
Whadduz it look like I’m doin’? George challenged me to a shot-off and I’m kickin’ his assssss.
Yep. In the course of twenty minutes, I decided it would be a good idea to go shot for shot with a giant. Luckily, Ashleigh carried me to the car, but not before I told the guy I was seeing at the time, and I quote, “I don’t want no one-minute man.” What can I say? Missy Elliott was super popular at the time, and that dude had the bedroom skills of Urkel. Not Urkel’s suave alter ego, Urquelle; I’m talking pure “Did I do that?” Urkel. Yes, yes you did do that. And you did that way too fast. Moving on . . .
We drove back over the county line, and Ash served as a crutch, leading me up the stairs to the bedroom. Once we got to the top we heard, “Mame, is that you?”
My blind-as-a-bat mother was holding on to the wall to lead herself up the stairs. Now, in any normal scenario, I’d have been caught. I just hoped that my mom’s sense of smell wasn’t heightened since her sight was gone, as I smelled like I’d taken a long soak in a batch of bathtub gin. Add to that the fact that it was a weeknight and I was coming home at one a.m.? No bueno. But luckily for me, my mom had taken her sleep meds.
Once she managed to reach the top of the steps, we went for a T. rex attack route and tried to hold as still as my drunk ass would allow. Which wasn’t even close to still. Ashleigh took charge.
ASHLEIGH
No, Caroline. This is all a dream. Mamrie and I have been in bed for hours. Now, go back to bed.
MAMRIE
Yeah, Mom. You’re dreaming.
And then I straight-up Wayne’s Worlded her, jazz-handing up and down in front of her face, with the “doo doo da loo” dream sequence sound effect.
MOM
Oh, okay. Night-night, girls.
And without a moment of hesitation, she turned and carefully headed down the stairs. Success!
What wasn’t so successful was my performance the next day at school. I was so hungover that I hit Snooze a million times, until Ashleigh physically forced me out of bed, with no time to shower. I sat there in class, answering a hundred questions about Hamlet, all while wearing sunglasses with little rhinestones in the shape of a heart in the corner. I would like to say I was just rocking a vintage look, but the truth is they had just become popular again because of Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle. I was a mess.
Since my brain was on a slower speed, I was last to finish my test. Everyone had already left for afternoon break when I sauntered up to Mr. Parrish’s desk. Mr. Parrish was the toughest, greatest teacher at our school. People feared him but also respected him. Kind of like Mr. Feeny from Boy Meets World. Or Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Minds but with fewer Coolio jams playing. I turned in the exam, and as I was walking out the door to go destroy some Baked Lay’s in the cafeteria, Mr. Parrish called out to me.
“Excited to see how you do, Miss Hart. I’ve never graded a test taken by someone reeking of vodka.”
With that I slowly pulled down my shades and said, “Mr. P., in the words of Shakespeare, ‘The teacher doth protest too much . . . methinks. And . . . me drinks,’” then walked out the door.*
These days I still have a hard time falling asleep, and I’d still rather depend on my big cup of gas station coffee in the morning to keep me going than resort to choco taco–level drugs. The only difference with my insomnia now is that I don’t let it bother me. “Jesus, take the wheel,” as they say.*
Instead of tossing and turning at three a.m., I crawl out of bed and snuggle into the couch just in time to hear the magical phrase “The following program is a paid advertisement” as I take a sip from a cold martini. With the mayhem of everyday life, sometimes it’s nice to be the only
kid awake in the world.
Sorry Camp-Ari
1½ oz Campari
1½ oz mescal
Juice of ½ tangerine
1 oz orange liqueur
1 sprig rosemary
Some sort of fire-making device (matches, a lighter, a caveman)
*Bonus ingredient: a broom to sweep up all the panties that will be thrown at you
Combine first four ingredients in a shaker full of ice and pump those biceps. Strain into a highball glass with one of them fancy-ass mega ice cubes. Here’s the fun part.
Clean and dry your shaker. Take your sprig of rosemary and lay it down on a piece of foil or other surface that you don’t mind burning. Light the rosemary on fire. As it smokes, invert the shaker and hold it over the rosemary, catching the smoke in the process. Once you think it’s filled with smoke, quickly close it over the top of the highball glass. You can carry that thing around to the other side of the party, and when you take off the shaker like a cloche over room service food, the smoke will billow out. It also gives the drink a nice woodsy flavor.
When my freshman year of college was winding down, there were a lot of unknowns. Like where was I going to live that summer? And just exactly how much weight had I gained that year? But the thing that was weighing heaviest on my mind (and not my thighs) was the housing situation. I could’ve gone home to live with my mom in my hometown. I could’ve also lain down in the middle of traffic, but it isn’t the preferred thing to do.*
I could’ve scrambled to stay in Chapel Hill for the summer, but there’s something creepy about being in a college town when school is out. The bars that normally have a line at the door are abandoned, tumbleweeds blowing past the foosball table. When you pop in for a quick one, the bartenders’ eyes light up as if they haven’t had a visitor in decades, like an old man at a nursing home or an employee at Hot Topic. It wasn’t ideal.
Luckily for me, those weren’t my only two options. Missionary trip to Africa, here I come! Ha—could you imagine? That is not what this chapter is about. One day while I was heading to Wendy’s class someone stopped me with a flyer. Normally I avoid flyers at all costs, but this time, for whatever reason,* I took one. It was for a camp fair happening on campus, where summer camps would come and recruit new counselors for the summer.
I almost threw away the flyer. I didn’t want to be a camp counselor! I’d never even been a camper. The closest I got to singing around a campfire was in my backyard during my pyromaniac phase, if you count doing voodoo chants while holding a Jonathan Taylor Thomas poster as “singing.” (Warning: Pine needles ignite pretty fast.)
I had a half hour to waste before my next Frosty class, so I did what I do whenever I pass a boys’ locker room: I decided to take a peek, despite the ill-fitting khaki shorts the guy who gave me the flyer was wearing. I walked into that camp fair and was immediately overwhelmed. Table upon table of well-groomed, chipper folks in their respective camp colors and polo shirts lined the rec hall, standing behind their small tables decorated to the max for their camp. I felt a little out of place in my Poison Flesh & Blood Tour halter top that I’d made myself, but I sucked up my pride. I did a lap, avoiding any real eye contact, before I talked to my first table.
“Hi! Thinking about being a counselor this summer?” I looked over and saw a smiling woman with a name tag that read LAURIE.
“Thinking about it . . .” I said apprehensively.
Then Laurie sold me. She told me all about this wonderful camp. It was founded in 1919! All the girls wore adorable old-school gray-and-green uniforms! It was tucked into the North Carolina mountains along a gorgeous blue lake and massive rock-faced mountain! But the thing that really got me was the large photo they had printed behind their table.
“That’s our Lady of the Lake tradition. It’s how we close out every summer.” The picture had the entire camp (decked out in all white) gathered on the docks at dusk. Candles floated among the lily pads, and one girl in a canoe in the middle of the lake held up a lit torch. It was a goddamn postcard.
“Where do I apply?” I was hooked.
Driving up to the camp that summer, I was nervous. What if I got camp-catfished? What if this gorgeous mountain camp in pictures was actually the geographic equivalent of a hillbilly meth head with two teeth? What if it was an awful dump and I was stuck there for two months without any friends? My fears were quickly squashed once I hit that camp road. It was pristine. This was no hillbilly. This was the Brad Pitt of summer camps. And not even Legends of the Fall Brad Pitt; I’m talking Meet Joe Black era.
I spent my summer teaching dance, performing silly shows every night, and basically acting like an idiot while campers laughed. I was good at this, dammit! I loved having a cabin full of girls just on the brink of high school and using those weeks to drill into their heads that boys are idiots and should be treated like white pants: avoid while on your period and after Labor Day.
I felt so at home at camp that I spent my next two summers there, bursting at the seams every time I made that first drive down the camp road, making Ariana Grande high notes when I reunited with my counselor friends.
Especially Hayley. Hayley was my camp BFF. She is literally the funniest person I know. She says whatever she wants, which is usually hilarious, and has the presence of Chris Farley without being a three-hundred-pound man. Have you ever met someone and thought, Gimme some of that? No, not sexually, but just charisma-wise? When I met Hayley that summer, she made me want to be funnier. If we were riding in a van of campers and they wanted to hear whatever bullshit boy band was popular, Hayley would make them listen to Hall & Oates. If it was ’80s day at camp, you’d better believe she was the first person with a high side pony, painting flames down the side of a golf cart. We were attached at the hip.
Here’s Hayley and me dressed as a tropical storm, which made the entire summer rainy.
When it came time to go back for the third summer, I decided to pass. I was going to miss camp, but I finally had a serious boyfriend, and we were going to road-trip around the southeast and bask in the splendor of our still-metabolized bodies. At least that’s what I thought. Two weeks before school ended, boyfriend decided he “wasn’t ready for a long-term relationship” and cheated on me. The fact that six months later he and this girl were engaged but it didn’t work out is totally irrelevant to this story, but totally relevant to my self-esteem.
I. Was. Pissed. My whole summer had been planned around that road trip. I didn’t have a summer sublet. I didn’t know what to do, and then it hit me.*
I would go back to camp! Obviously I would have free room and board, but more important, I would have a perfect environment to mend my shat-on heart. Trust me, there is no better place to get over a guy than going to an all-girls camp for the summer. Strong female friendships. Zero cell service, so you can’t drunk-text your ex. And best of all, a 20:1 female-to-male staff ratio. I immediately drunk-power-walked back to my apartment to e-mail the camp director.*
If this story sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because I used it as inspiration for Camp Takota. Unlike in the movie, I wasn’t engaged and freshly fired from a job, but like the lead character, I did go back up to camp, and it was just what I needed. I quickly fell right into the daily routine of being a counselor, which also includes living for your days off.
If you want to know what a day off for a camp counselor is like, just watch Wet Hot American Summer. Their version of going into town ends with them mugging old ladies and Michael Showalter shooting heroin in a crack house, which may be a little extreme, but I can tell you firsthand that we camp counselors took our days off seriously. We would go hard on those precious thirty hours a week away from camp.
Rather than throw out my campers’ candy that they snuck into camp, I decided to keep it in a large plastic container under my bed. Notice how I sit on it, holding all the power. Mind games are fun.
Don
’t get me wrong. I loved camp—loved all of it! But there comes a breaking point, usually at day six in a row. You feel like if you have to sing one more song, eat one more smiley face–shaped tater tot, or have one more seven-year-old ask you what a “bagina” is, you’re gonna lose it. When the clock struck five p.m. on that day, all you’d see was a cloud of dust behind my Honda Accord (because that’s how dirt roads work).
Days off brought a few options. Since our camp was about an hour outside Asheville, most of our days off were spent going to bars in the city and crashing on our friends’ couches. Other nights were spent at my friend Chrissie’s lake house right outside camp.*
Over the course of those three summers, we had some legendary nights off. But the most memorable I ever had was the last one of that breakup summer. Camp was ending Tuesday but I had that Saturday night off. It was perfect. Hayley and I decided to keep it local and spend the night in the small town of Sylva.
Sylva is about twenty minutes from camp. It’s the home of Western Carolina University and not much else. It’s the kind of town that has one bar and whenever a nonlocal walks in a record-scratch sound effect is cued. The kind of town that could realistically vote a cat in as mayor because “everybody gets along with him.”
