How to Survive a Summer

by Nick White

  Before we parted, Bevy asked a favor. “Funny you should mention the movie,” she said. “QueerLive is actually meeting about it next week.” Bevy had tried to coax me to attend these consciousness-raising meetings at the university ever since I’d known her. But I had had enough congregations for one lifetime and wanted none of it. When I placed my hand on the handle, Bevy locked me in. “I’m not asking,” she said, half kidding. “Not really.”

  In the front yard, green buds studded the branches of a lone tree. When I was a boy, I knew all the species of trees around the parsonage—water oak, dogwood, pine. In the Delta, trees break up the flatness. Their names were easy to learn, fell on my tongue and never left, but here, in a city so far away, I couldn’t even remember the name of this one I’d seen cycle through the seasons for nearly five years.

  “Will?” Bevy was eyeballing me.

  “I don’t understand why you need me there, exactly.”

  “Exactly?” Her eyebrows, so thin she had to pencil most of them in, arched. “A little context is all.” She shifted in her seat to face me. “I need you to explain to the group how this movie is the worst thing to happen to our community since Pacino turned tricks in Cruising.”

  “And why would they listen to me?”

  “Because,” she said, “they are tired of hearing me bitch and moan at them. Because you are an expert.” She leaned forward. “And don’t give me that line about how the movie isn’t in your wheelhouse or whatnot, okay? I need the appearance of expertise more than anything. Someone to underline my words for me. These faggots, Will, have gotten too complacent in this . . . this”—she waved her arms—“this new acceptance. They’ve never known what it was like before gay was cool. Never known the struggle we did—and you are going to help me wake them up to their own marginalization. Woke, Will. I want them woke.”

  “Bevy,” I said. “That sounds intense.”

  “Damn right.” She sat back and scooped her hair into a ponytail. “Hand me a rubber band, will you?” She gestured toward the glove compartment at my knees; I popped the latch and riffled around old combs and plastic wrappers and gummy coins before I found her one that was reasonably clean. After twisting it into her hair, she loosened her tie and then tilted the rearview mirror toward her face. Using tissue paper and spit, she dabbed makeup from her skin. She was prepping, I recognized, for the gym. After long days at the office, she liked to take to the track and, as she put it, “outrun her nerves.”

  Then I remembered what I’d needed her for in the first place. “Oh, shit,” I said. “My dissertation!”

  She told me to relax, that we could reschedule. “You just be ready, mister, to help me next week.”

  I nodded and got out of the car. Above the rooftops across the street, the sky had warmed into hot pink with zero clouds to blemish its wide expanse. As I reached in the backseat for my satchel, Bevy said, “Oh, and there’ll be someone there you should meet.”

  I pulled out my bag then stopped, blinked. “Wait—romancewise?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Bevy, no.”

  She had never tried to set me up before. Plus, she knew it had been only two months since my last relationship had imploded. My long-distance boyfriend, a librarian in upstate New York, confessed to still being in love with his ex, someone who lived much closer to him. “Someone more open to something more real,” he had written in an e-mail, and I didn’t ask him to explain because, of course, I knew what he had meant. I’d heard it all before from the men who found themselves in my bed for longer than a night. “Tell me,” they said, “tell me everything.” And when I didn’t, because I couldn’t—how could I tell everything?—they spotted the trouble and sooner or later they were gone.

  Bevy waved me away from the car, a bemused look on her face. “Just keep an open mind,” she said. “And look smart.”

  I squatted down and gazed at her through the open passenger’s window. “And how do I normally look, goddamnit?”

  She drove away without saying.

  —

  The Victorian was dead silent.

  Only the moaning of an old house long past its prime as I climbed the stairs to my apartment. Elementary Ed had most likely gone out, and the Great Dane was probably snoozing. While a Lean Cuisine nuked in the microwave, I cut on the TV. Twin brothers were explaining to a middle-aged hetero couple why they couldn’t afford the house of their dreams but could afford a shabbier version the brothers would gladly help them renovate. But when they discovered more money was needed to repair shoddy plumbing, I turned the TV off.

  After dinner, I stripped down to my underwear and combed the Internet for porn. I used an outdated desktop for these searches—Xtube, Pornhub—but nothing interested me tonight. The thrashing of naked bodies vaguely sickened my stomach. I switched over to my work laptop and netflixed Written on the Wind. Something familiar to counteract the funk I’d fallen into. But the movie was useless at stopping the rocks turning over in my head. So I went into my bedroom and stared at my bookshelf. My fingers traced the spines of the books, pausing over the one shoved-in spine first so I couldn’t read the title, though I knew it all the same: The Summer I First Believed. I slid it from the shelf. The cover showed a shirtless boy, arms outstretched to affect the shape of a cross, wading into a pond of water. The book felt insignificant in my hands, a slim thing, two hundred pages at most. I flipped it open to the title page. A sloppy inscription from the author to me read, “I hope this story finds you.” The words always mystified me. Now I read them differently. Now it sounded like a warning.

  —

  In the days before the QueerLive meeting, I gobbled up the book. My dissertation lost priority. I gave myself up to old ghosts, old ways of moving and thinking. I only had to set the book aside two or three times—when the words became too much for me, when one of my spells threatened to pull me under. The author of The Summer I First Believed was anonymous, but I recognized him because he admitted he was a counselor, and Camp Levi, short on funds, employed just two: both of them theology students from a New Orleans seminary. Rick was tall and thin. His beard covered most of his face—from his cheeks to his Adam’s apple. Larry was huskier, a blue bandanna perpetually tied around his slick bald head. Of the two, Larry interacted with us the most, always quick with a Bible verse. Rick mostly hung back and observed. He had planned on writing an article about the summer for The Baptist Record, a description of the camp’s tactics—however extreme—and their effects on curbing the devil’s most insidious of sins.

  According to The Summer I First Believed, Rick and Larry spent the summer battling their attraction to each other and didn’t recognize the trouble until it was too late. Rick never mentioned our names or singled us out. He referred to us as “the boys.” His version glossed over so much, including the “accident” that shut down the camp. The book didn’t lie exactly; it told the truth poorly. Which maybe we all do a little in telling our own stories. Rick never experienced Lake John or the Sweat Shack firsthand. In his book, the focus was on his acceptance of himself as a gay man and his secret rendezvous with Larry at night while the rest of us slept.

  After finishing The Summer I First Believed, I drank codeine-laced cough syrup left over from a bout with strep throat. Then, woozy, I composed an e-mail to Rick. I sent it to the publishing house with instructions for the message to be forwarded on to the author, wherever he was.

  My dear Rick,

  Just finished your book. At last! In time to see the movie. I hope our blood was enough to make your pockets fat, you bastard.

  Sincerely,

  Will

  P.S. Totally knew you and Larry were homo for each other.

  —

  QueerLive was held on the second floor of the student union, a sprawling labyrinth of concrete and glass. I arrived late to the meeting, walking in just as Bevy was asking everyone to please take their sea
ts. She wore a cream-colored pantsuit, and her hair was pulled back in an extravagant-looking French braid. When she saw me, she waved me forward. “There you are!” she called out.

  The others in the conference room glanced my way. Chairs lined against three of the walls formed a semicircle big enough for twenty people. By my count, ten had shown, mostly the sort I always expected to find at one of these get-togethers. The pierced and purple haired. The sissy queen and the bull dyke. I even clocked a trans man in a Fleetwood Mac T-shirt, his neck studded with puka shells. Some unusual suspects, too: two young women, both wisp thin and hair sprayed, in matching hoodies emblazoned with the Greek lettering of the Delta Delta Delta sorority, as well as a muscly athlete in a backward baseball cap and flip-flops. He must have been nineteen, maybe twenty, and looked like so many straight-acting white males on campus did—all of them versions of the same masculine prototype, filling up space because it was theirs to fill. A birthright you never questioned. We locked eyes; he smiled. His teeth were big and impossibly white. I couldn’t fathom what had led such a specimen so far away from his gang of bros and into this camp of dissatisfied queers. Unless he was questioning. In which case, for all I knew, he could have been the person Bevy wanted to introduce to me. If so, I was tempted.

  Most of them didn’t want to be there. I knew it the moment I ducked in. Such a feeling was often in my freshman writing courses, especially on the first day of class. A commingling of suspicion, woe, and resentment washing up to the front of the room where the poor teacher stood: Astonish us, the students said in all the ways they didn’t speak, their silence an indictment.

  If Bevy noticed this, she didn’t let on. After I took a seat beside the podium, she began her tirade against the movie without any preamble or introduction. Hunched over the podium, she preached fire and brimstone, listing off the many offenses of Proud Flesh. I thought of my father. He proselytized to congregations not much larger than this one. His means for reaching the unbeliever were legion and probably inappropriate for the setting. No matter the occasion, he could be counted on for a sense of humor—something Bevy, bless her, did not possess. Even the whimsy of a French braid was lost on her hardness. As she spoke, I scanned the crowd. Flip-flops and several of the queers slouched in their seats, their eyes titled upward to the ceiling. Only the Greek sisters convinced me, in the peppy way they nodded their heads at Bevy’s talking points, that they had any interest in the meeting. Bevy powered through, making a case that the movie was an egregious step backward in how our community was represented on film. The film’s release, she argued, could lead to rises in gay bashings, suicides, and oppressive laws. “You just wait,” she told us.

  I’d tried all week to figure out what to say, but nothing came. After finishing The Summer I First Believed, I googled the movie and learned, to my surprise, the project had begun in earnest. The book was a moderate best seller, attracting the attention of a production company. They bought the rights to the story for a hefty sum and kept Rick on—at least initially—as a story consultant, still protecting his anonymity. Several prominent directors considered the property; all passed. Officially, they claimed “scheduling conflicts.” Unofficially, it was reported, they feared the material was too dark and, certainly, too gay. Not long after, and for mysterious reasons, Rick left the production. After his departure, the screenplay went through many more “treatments” before producers were happy with it. A director was hired at last. He was an upstart with a background in prestige television. I’d never watched any of his credits, TV or otherwise, but the name Robert Dolittle kicked something loose in my brain. He tinkered even more with the script, according to reports, and in a year, The Summer I First Believed was transformed into Proud Flesh.

  The new story erased most of what happened in 1999. Now the plot centered on a group of hipsters—all straight and mostly white—who traveled to the dilapidated campgrounds in Mississippi one summer with intentions to refurbish and rebrand it into a gay-affirming camp. Years before, the camp had functioned as a nightmarish retreat for boys afflicted by the homosexual lifestyle. In the world of the movie, not completely unlike the world it was based on, the camp closed after one of the campers went missing, presumed to have killed himself in the woods though a body was never found. Unbeknownst to the hipsters, the boy was not dead. He was now a man crazed by years of living alone in the wild. The appearance of the hipsters sent him into a chaotic killing spree. In one scene after another, would-be do-gooders meet their demise at the hands of the traumatized homosexual.

  Bevy paused to sip water, then asked, “Did you watch the trailer I posted in our Facebook group?” No one answered, and she winced—showing her hand at last. “People, I—” She stopped herself and shuffled papers around on the podium, producing a manila folder. She opened it and flipped through the pages until she found the one she wanted. “Listen to this,” she told us. “Just you listen: The tagline for the poster says, ‘Someone is coming for them. An abomination they can scarcely imagine.’” She repeated the second sentence then added: “Abomination—you hear that?”

  Her intention to rouse the audience from their stupor affected only me. I slumped in my seat. This time, my spell began with the memory of water. The burning in my nose and throat, the gagging. I shut my eyes. I told myself to remember my location, the facts of my current surroundings: I was in a gleaming student union. Miles away from the camp. Safe. As the hallucination faded, I opened my eyes to find everyone gawking at me. I shook my head as if I were trying to wake myself up. I had successfully forced the memory back down. A first. Turns out, my fear of making a spectacle of myself overpowered all others.

  Bevy looked puzzled. So did everyone else. It dawned on me they were waiting for me to respond to a question I hadn’t heard. I coughed, said, “Say again?” and Bevy did what I knew she hated most: She repeated herself, speaking slowly, every word labored over. “Explain to them,” she said, “why this movie will hurt us.” She glanced at the group. “Will here studies film and is gay, so . . .”

  I stood up. Then I sat back down. Always best, my father once recommended, to focus on a single person when speaking to a group. Deciding on the person—that was the tricky part. Not Bevy. She still lorded over us from her perch behind the podium. Not the girl across from me, the one with pierced cheeks gnawing on a strand of multicolored hair. Her sharp eyes warned me away. Flip-flops was no help. He crossed his legs, then uncrossed them, then did it all over, reflecting my own nervous energy back at me. I settled on the trans guy. He was smiling and nodding. Now that I had the floor, the words seemed to evaporate before I could think of them. Normally, I excelled at speaking off the cuff in my classroom, where I pretended to be an intellectual. Here, in this room, I didn’t know how to feign confidence.

  As I considered the stiffness of the trans guy’s overly gelled hair, a rogue idea fell into my skull. Well, stupid, why not tell them the obvious. The answer was there all along, and I had avoided it, as I do so many other things. Not even Bevy knew the bomb I could drop in this room. I’d begin by telling them all the ways the movie misrepresented what had happened. There was a lake, I would say, that ravaged the skin. And a boy didn’t go missing, no. He died. I know because I watched it happen.

  “So then,” I said instead, “because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spur thee out of my mouth.”

  The Bible verse and my irony in using it went over everyone’s head: more looks of confusion. Bevy said, “I’m sorry?” and the vibe in the room tilted precariously toward catastrophe. All my doing. I had failed to be of any help here. I hated groups. Queer groups especially. All those gaping wounds in one place. To save us from the abyss of awkwardness, I went for a joke. “So a gay serial killer, you guys.” I paused a beat. “Think Jason Voorhees with more fitted coveralls.”

  No one laughed. Flip-flops raised an arm, and asked, with all sincerity, “So he kills gay people?”

  “No, no,
no,” said one of the Tri Deltas. “A serial killer who just happens to be gay. Which I think is kind of progressive.”

  Pierced cheeks spoke up then and told her why she was wrong.

  And with that, they were talking. A full-blown conversation. Eventually, the trans guy’s voice clamored over the rest. “But I hear,” he said. “I hear it’s based on shit that really happened.” A rhinestone sparkled in his left ear. “What about Jeffrey Dahmer?” he asked no one in particular. “Total gay, total killer. If it happened, it happened, right?”

  “That doesn’t matter,” Bevy told him. “It’s not about accuracy. Goddamnit!” She slapped the podium. “It’s about representation.”

  Now everyone laughed.

  —

  After the meeting, Flip-flops sidled up to introduce himself. The minute after he said his name—something bland and suburban—I forgot it. I learned that, in addition to being a scholar athlete, he used the word “really” more than anyone ought to. “Really the best talk I’ve been to all semester,” he told me, producing a form for me to sign. “Just to verify that I was, you know, really here and all.” His attendance fulfilled a requirement for a gender and sexuality course he was taking. Several other students held similar-looking forms. Which explained their attendance despite their indifference. A shame.

  “I think you need her.” I nodded toward Bevy. She was lurking in the entryway, shelling out fliers that promoted the upcoming protest of the movie. Tomorrow night, queer groups across the country were staging demonstrations at theaters before the movie premiered at midnight. Bevy was leading one at Cinema Station, the local movie house just off of campus. She had created a logjam of students, with the sorority sisters in the lead, telling them why they should be at the demonstration.