by Nick White
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
375 Hudson Street
New York, New York 10014
Copyright © 2017 by Nick White
“Tiara” © 1991 by Mark Doty
Epigraph from “Some Notes on River Country” © 1944 by Eudora Welty
Epigraph from “For What Binds Us,” first appeared in Of Gravity & Angels (Wesleyan University Press) © 1988 by Jane Hirshfield, used by permission.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: White, Nick, [date-] author.
Title: How to survive a summer : a novel / Nick White.
Description: New York, New York : Blue Rider Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016058812 (print) | LCCN 2017017206 (ebook) | ISBN 9780399573699 (epub) | ISBN 9780399573682 (hardback)
Subjects: LCSH: Graduate teaching assistants—Fiction. | Gay teenagers—Fiction. | Camps—Fiction. | Psychic trauma—Fiction. | Mississippi—Fiction. | Psychological fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Gay. | FICTION / Coming of Age.
Classification: LCC PS3623.H578726 (ebook) | LCC PS3623.H578726 H69 2017 (print) | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016058812
p. cm.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Version_1
CONTENTS
■
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION
EPIGRAPH
PART ONE | MISTER MISSISSIPPI ONE | BASED ON A TRUE STORY
TWO | THE NECK
THREE | THE NEW FAMILY
FOUR | DO THIS IN REMEMBRANCE OF ME
FIVE | QUICKSILVER
PART TWO | THE SONS OF LEVI SIX | ORIENTATION
SEVEN | REORIENTATION
EIGHT | TREATMENT
NINE | REHABILITATION
TEN | RELEASE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
To my parents, for their love and support.
Sometimes we wake not knowing
how we came to lie here,
or who has crowned us with these temporary,
precious stones.
—MARK DOTY, “Tiara”
PART ONE
■
MISTER MISSISSIPPI
■
A place that ever was
lived in is like a fire
that never goes out.
—EUDORA WELTY,
“Some Notes on River Country”
ONE
■
BASED ON A TRUE STORY
A Saturday afternoon in late May, Bobby came into our office talking about a movie. I had never heard of it before now. Later, when I finally tell others about this moment, they simply cannot believe that that movie could have snuck up on me the way it did. At the time, however, it was not so unusual: I was a graduate student in film studies, yes, but my interest was in postwar melodramas of the 1950s. Imitation of Life, Magnificent Obsession. New releases rarely caught my attention. From what I gathered by the way Bobby carried on, this one was a scary movie, a real doozy—well outside the bounds of my expertise. “Creepy stuff,” he was saying to Cheryl, another officemate of mine.
The three of us shared a windowless space on the third floor of the English Department at a midwestern university—one I’ll refrain from naming because it hardly matters for my story. The office was barely big enough for our three desks. Each one was shoved against a different wall, mine beside the community filing cabinet. Normally, the office cleared out for the weekends. So this morning I had been surprised—and mildly annoyed—to find Cheryl at her desk, that carrot-colored hair of hers all bunched up behind her head in a scrunchie. She quietly paged through several books, making notes, never once turning around to bother me. Then Bobby showed up and ruined it.
Together they made a genuine commotion. Bobby wanted to pull up the movie trailer on YouTube to show her what he was talking about, his beefy fingers clicking along her laptop’s keyboard. I fumed. I was going to ask them to use headphones to watch the trailer, but Bobby pressed play before I could speak, and a voice from across the room—not to mention from across space and time and even death—rang out from the laptop’s speakers. Acoustic, bare: “Beulah Land,” the voice sang. “I’m longing for you.”
My skin prickled at the sound of her voice, with the memory of old sores long since healed. On the wall above my desk, several postcards were thumbtacked to a cork board by a grad student before my time. Rio, Tokyo, Amsterdam. A god’s-eye view of the cities: their winding roads and closely packed buildings, each snapshot taunting me with elsewhere. The song continued on, infecting the air. Her voice, Mother Maude’s, like a slap. The office, the camp—they collapsed into one. The stink of Lake John. The other boys shouting, louder than hell. Lord, they cried, burn me anew!
—
In the summer of 1999, when I was fifteen years old, I spent almost four weeks at a camp that was supposed to cure me of my homosexuality. Though I changed in many ways at Camp Levi, my desires—to the grief of everyone involved—did not. The campgrounds were located in central Mississippi on a rural spit of hinterland called the Neck, two and half hours south of the Delta, where I grew up. Camp Levi wasn’t affiliated with any particular Christian denomination. The founders, Mother Maude and Father Drake, had ties to churches of all kinds, each of them instrumental in helping raise the money to pilot the program, including the church where my father was once the pastor. Before she started the camp, Mother Maude enjoyed a short-lived career as a gospel singer that ran out of steam sometime before her twin brother (and former manager) contracted AIDS. After his death, she vowed to save other boys from a similar fate, and so the idea for the camp was born.
Her cover of “Beulah Land,” popular on Christian radio in the mid-1980s, accompanied the movie trailer playing on Cheryl’s laptop. There was no voice-over. Only clips from the movie, which I couldn’t stomach looking at, and Mother Maude’s weepy voice, which I couldn’t escape. Their bodies leaned into each other, the way lovers do, forming a kind of triangle. Their affair was a secret. I’d discovered it, without even trying, months ago simply by reading this kind of body language. I always forgot the reason it was such a scandal for them to be sleeping together. One or the other was married, but I couldn’t remember who. Cheryl was the first to speak: “Wow,” she said. “That was—just wow.” Bobby followed by condemning the South: “It’s fucked up, all of it. Those people.” His pronouncement was enough to settle the matter between them. They changed the subject, and he asked if she was hungry. “Always,” Cheryl told him, her voice low and vaguely suggestive, while on the other side of the room, I was biting my lip to keep from screaming. They debated possible restaurants, agreeing on Mexican. “Is this the
one with the good fried ice cream?” Bobby asked, as they brushed past my desk. They spoke to me then, briefly, a casual remark said in a hurry, over their shoulders almost, How are you, and I nodded. I smiled, though they weren’t looking at me. Why would they? Their minds were on each other, on what was next. Once they were gone, I locked the door and killed the lights. In the dark, I slid under my desk. I was small enough to fold my body into the leg space down there and still have enough room left over to pull my rolling chair up to my chest and rest my face, cheek down, on the warm cushioned seat.
When I returned home from the camp, I had trouble with the details of what had happened to me. They were slippery things, made of water. Even when I testified at the trial, I struggled to answer definitively the lawyers’ questions. “I can’t recall,” I’d say, until the judge interrupted me, and said, not unkindly, “Son, can’t or won’t?” Only later did particulars resurface. The first time occurred when I was moving from Vanderbilt to where I live now. I had driven for most of the day and stopped at a Comfort Inn. I lay in bed, the AC unit turned up as high as it would go, the curtains closed. As I drifted, I heard the chant we boys used to holler before jumping into the lake: “Lord, rend my flesh! Lord, burn me anew!” I sprang up from the mattress. I checked the closet, looked outside my window and down the hallway. Nothing. And that was the terrible part: the silence that followed. The silence that proved you were crazy all along. Sometimes there were only voices. I’d be reading, making dinner, bathing, and snippets of conversation from that summer would float by as if coming from a television set that was left on in another room. But sometimes it was worse. The voices grew into memory, and the memory gathered itself into muscle and bone. Into Father Drake’s hands clasped around my neck, pushing me against the Sweat Shack. Into Mother Maude’s terrible embrace, holding me still until the others had found me. I’d get the shakes then and break into a cold sweat. One time, in a graduate class, a professor saw me in the thrall of one of these spells and, thinking I was a diabetic, sent another classmate off to the vending machine to fetch me a pack of Skittles.
As I sat under my desk, I considered Mother Maude’s song in this new and strange context. Her music never brought her any wide acclaim outside of the Bible Belt. The notion that her song would be part of the soundtrack for a movie was ridiculous—unless, that is, the movie had something to do with the camp. I gripped the chair and pressed my face harder into the seat cushion. In my front pocket, my cell vibrated with an incoming call. I turned it off. I breathed, clearing my brain of distractions. My breath became deeper, more precise. I don’t know how long it was—thirty minutes? an hour?—before there came a knock. I reared back, slamming my head against the top of the desk. The doorknob jiggled. Someone was frantic, calling out my name, “Will? Will?” It was my friend Bevy, who had planned on meeting me at the library this very afternoon. I had forgotten.
“You just missed him,” I called out. “Come back tomorrow.”
She hit the door with what sounded like her fist. “I’m not playing,” she said.
A graduate of law school and a tireless advocate for social justice, Bevy had what people called “direction.” A thing my dissertation (and possibly my life) sorely lacked. My future in academia was in question, and she had agreed to help me sort out a plan for how to finish writing my dissertation and graduate on time. She excelled at strategy: locating the problem and determining the best solution for solving it. My dissertation was a queer analysis of Douglas Sirk films, but after finishing the first chapter on Dorothy Malone’s campy performance in Written on the Wind, I lacked the intellectual stamina required to complete the project. At twenty-six, I had been in school for most of my life; I was tired. I wanted to turn my brain off from thinking about ideas that were specific and erudite and try something else. Something that tested the body and let the mind alone.
When I opened the office door, Bevy was awash in fluorescent light. Her voice was deep and unforgiving: “What are you doing?” She said she’d tried calling. “I mean, what the fuck, dude?” I pretended to yawn, and my mouth, liking the suggestion, stretched into a real one. “So imagine,” I lied, “I fell asleep in my office.” I stepped back, my eyes adjusting to the bright hallway. Bevy was in her lawyering outfit. Her black hair parted down the middle. Foundation blended into her moon-pale skin. Her suit tailored to the square angles of her body, slightly wrinkled from a full day at the firm where she worked. Just the sight of her, adorned in all this evidence of her full and busy life, racked me with guilt.
“Oh, Bevy,” I said.
Her face relaxed, and she sighed. She wouldn’t press me any further. I imagined she would treat her clients like this: hone in on the lies worth pursuing and wave away the ones that weren’t. Our friendship was built on her mastery of this skill. We had met at a crowded gay bar downtown a few years before. Bevy was going from table to table handing out fliers encouraging queers to vote in the upcoming state elections, and I was waiting for a date, someone I had met online. She slapped a neon-green handbill on my table. “So what’s your story?” she said, and I said, “Do what?” She laughed. “Do what? Did I stutter?” she asked, mocking my drawl. I had my canned answers. The vagaries I told boyfriends and fellow grad students and professors when they asked me to account for myself. But with Bevy and her straightforwardness, I froze. She must have recognized the bewildered expression on my face. A look that told her my story could not be summed up in a few words. So she changed tactics. She laughed again, more gently this time, and gave my arm a squeeze. She whispered, “No worries, hon,” and moved along. Later in the night, after it was clear my date wasn’t coming, she circled back and ordered us drinks—Long Island iced teas. We kept the conversation light, discussing our hatred of the second Bush, an easy point of reference back then.
From that night on, a friendship developed. Any time she needed a plus one and her girlfriend—a doctor in residency—was too busy, I was called. I joined her for protests, too, outside the offices of public officials who had attracted her ire. If she believed in a cause, she supported it tirelessly. (I flattered myself in believing I was one of them.) She did most the talking when we were together. Which I didn’t mind, even encouraged. She told me about her hometown in Iowa; about her parents, both high school teachers and semisupportive of her interest in girls; about her goals—after practicing law for five years, she planned to go into public service and run for local office. The only hiccup was her inability to pass the bar. “Like most standardized tests,” she once told me, “the bar is racist and sexist.” She was currently studying for her third try. I asked her once how a test like that could be prejudiced, and her eyes squinted, and she said, “Isn’t it obvious?” and I said, “Oh, right,” like I had remembered the answer even though I had no clue. About me, she knew very little. She knew I was from the South but thought Tennessee since I had attended Vanderbilt. I didn’t see any reason to correct her. She never asked about my parents. Perhaps she sensed a tender subject in how little I mentioned them.
She’d never seen me just after one of my spells, either. If she noticed anything peculiar about my behavior now, she had the grace to keep it to herself. She leaned against the puke-colored wall as I packed up, thumbing through e-mails on her smartphone. The picture of professionalism. I had no delusions: Bevy was more important than I was. Her time too valuable to be squandered. I told her so as I shoved my laptop and papers into my satchel, trying to be quick. When I was ready, she looked up from her phone and nodded for me to follow her out, not a trace of resentment in her face. She looped her arm through mine as we walked downstairs. A kindness like hers could break over you like a strong wave, nearly bringing you to your knees. As with other people in my life, a gulf of the unsaid lay between us. She was different, however, because she’d not let that stop her from cobbling together a relationship with me. I couldn’t understand her persistence any more than she could probably understand my own strange ways. We didn’
t question it. Wasn’t our style. Outside, she guided me through the empty campus, down a sidewalk edged with sprays of periwinkles, to the concrete parking garage near the library. There was no need for her to tell me she was taking me home. On this, at least, we understood each other perfectly.
—
Ibraved a question about the movie when we were close to my apartment.
“Oh, that shit.” Bevy was surprised I hadn’t heard of it. “Aren’t you like, um, getting a PhD in film studies?”
“Not contemporary film.”
The movie, she told me, was based on a memoir. “But just barely,” she added. I knew about the book. Three years ago, a copy had appeared in my mailbox. I couldn’t bring myself to read it, but I couldn’t throw it out, either, so the book sat on my bookshelf in a kind of limbo. “Supposedly,” Bevy said, “it happened down in your part of the country—one of those camps.” She didn’t linger on the memoir. The movie was the offense—which was only tangentially related to the original story. The script had undergone many rewrites, she said, before becoming a slasher flick in its final incarnation. “Proud Flesh.” She turned down my street. “Think Friday the 13th meets Sleepaway Camp meets I don’t know what.”
“Sounds awful.”
Her foot eased on the brake, and she looked at me. “More than awful, Will. A group of pretty straight people are terrorized by a damaged gay dude in the woods. It’s not just awful—it’s fucking incendiary.”
My apartment was in the university district, one of the cheapest neighborhoods in the city. The area had that air of collapsed beauty found in most forgotten places. Weedy front lawns and wrecked sidewalks and sagging front porches. Old Victorians that were once the symbol of an aspirational middle class and now were an undergraduate dumping ground. I lived on the second floor of the house at the end of the street. Vines clung to the east wall, knotty and funguslike, blotting out the sun from coming through my bedroom window. A noisy elementary education major shared the first floor with her Great Dane, and as Bevy pulled up to the curb, I longed for them. I wanted to leap from Bevy’s Volvo and race up the fire escape and plop down on my bed in the dark and lose myself in whatever electronic dance music my neighbor’s stereo was thumping out.
