THE CAMPSITES WERE ALL LOCATED IN A LARGE BOWL IN THE FOREST, a gentle circular valley shaded by tall maples. We’d hiked in with our local scout troop, arriving at the jamboree for a few days of woodcraft and scout lore. I had on my back my trusty external frame pack, a little beige number that I’d attached my tent and sleeping bag to with bungee cords. I had brought all the necessary survival gear: canteen, Marvel comics, Garbage Pail Kid cards, and a trusty Swiss Army knife. Many of the other troops had already lit smoky fires in hastily assembled rings of stones and put up their tents, so from a distance the valley looked like an army encampment where all the soldiers were prepubescent. My fellow scouts hustled down to figure out a space to build our own little fire ring and set up tents, but all I could think about was getting down there and putting some poor screaming kid into a figure-four leglock.
I don’t think the significance of the World Wrestling Federation in terms of aiding a budding sense of identity can be overestimated. Growing up in the 1980s, the steroidal heroes of my youth figured massively in my imagination, both literally and figuratively. Hulk Hogan, “Rowdy” Roddy Piper, Mr. T, the British Bulldogs, George “The Animal” Steele—these slickly oiled, obscenely muscled entertainers were, to me, the personification of cool. But none of these pituitary oddities held me in thrall quite like my personal favorite, Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka.
Snuka was a Fijian wrestler who raised the bruising art of wrestling-as-entertainment to the level of art with the introduction of his high-flying “superfly” moves. He’d climb to the top of a fifteen-foot cage around the ring and leap, body fully extended like a gibbon jacked on cocaine, and crush opponents. It was like watching a tiger pounce on prey, and to me, a young kid, it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen.
Perhaps seeing my obsession with Snuka and the WWF in general moved my parents to the decision; perhaps it was the hope of instilling some sense of civic responsibility and moral fiber. Either way, I was enrolled in Boy Scouts, where my love of wrestling would cause one of the most traumatic experiences of my young life.
I attended exactly this one jamboree during my short career as a scout. For the uninitiated: A jamboree is where multiple troops from a particular region all meet and camp together for a few days, dozens of young boys out in nature learning woodcraft and citizenship and how to avoid overzealous scoutmasters.
There were no toilets or even outhouses where we camped in the forested valley. The scoutmasters designed and oversaw the construction of a latrine, which was simply a hole dug next to a fallen log a short walk from the main camping area. The process of using this ingenious setup was hideously pantomimed by one of the troop leaders. He imitated the act of dropping his pants, sat on the log with his derriere sticking over the edge, and walked us through how we’d deposit our contribution into the hole. A military folding shovel was stuck in the ground nearby; you covered up your offerings with a few scoops of dirt in an ineffectual bid to avoid mass E. coli–related outbreaks of dysentery.
The problem was that this arrangement became high entertainment for the scouts, who would gather to watch the unfortunate boy who chose to relieve himself, hooting and hollering in giggling, pointing knots of derision as the beet-faced kid grunted and tried to poop, meticulously recording the moment in minute detail in their hippocampus to relate to therapists decades hence.
There was no way in hell I was going to use that latrine. I felt it represented a dignity event horizon, beyond which I could never return to normalcy. I decided, as I walked back toward the main camp, that I would “hold it” for as long as necessary rather than subject myself to soul-rending shame.
I wasn’t the only young boy obsessed with the stars of the WWF. Many of my fellow scouts also shared my passion for bikini bottom–clad giants, so we formed a “ring” made of fallen trees and took turns wrestling each other. This was great fun, and we even developed “tag teams” and had “managers,” as the typical wrestling script called for sneak attacks by managers who clobbered unsuspecting wrestlers with folding chairs.
Soon we had a good group of kids playing. This was the 1980s, so adult supervision was practically nonexistent. Some of the older scouts were already surging with testosterone, and savagely thrashed us younger kids. Tears abounded. One brute, who looked for all the world like a grown man, hurled one kid down and stood over his wrecked body, sticking out his tongue à la George “The Animal” Steele. That was fine by me if he wanted to pretend to be Steele. I was adamant: I was Snuka. Other boys chose their own personas—“Macho Man” Randy Savage, King Kong Bundy, or André the Giant—but I, and only I, could be Snuka. He was my guy, and represented a kind of zenith of wrestling awesomeness.
Snuka’s life outside the ring was ugly. In 1983 his girlfriend at the time, Nancy Argentino, was beaten to death in the George Washington motor lodge in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Snuka would be charged with third degree murder in 2015 for her death, but deemed unable to stand trial due to mental incompetency. In the final years of his life, Snuka suffered from various symptoms related to chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, which is the disease du jour for NFL players and wrestlers who spend years smashing their heads into each other.
Snuka was no saint, obviously. Addicted to cocaine and a heavy steroid user, the narrative of his life is painful to read. I knew none of it at the time. I was blissfully ignorant of his personal life, just in love with his high-flying, Tarzan-esque antics. I revered him far more than the most prominent star of the time, Hulk Hogan, who came across as this stereotypical American hero, do-rag and ridiculous mustache pointing toward a cartoonish male virility that I couldn’t jibe with.
In 2016 Hogan filed a lawsuit against Gawker, a blog site that documented a leaked sex tape that featured Hogan. He was supported by Peter Thiel, a tech mogul and Donald Trump supporter. The lawsuit bankrupted Gawker. Perhaps as some kind of karmic payback, Hogan was outed during this period in recordings that have him using the N-word to describe his daughter’s romantic partner. Sex tapes and hate speech. Classy guy.
It’s always painful when the heroes of our youth turn out to be murderers, addicts, racists, and planetary-sized assholes. But in Vermont during the 1980s, that’s what we had; it was either monster trucks or wrestling. So there at the jamboree, I helped organize a WWF-style smackdown and happily threw myself into the ring when I was tagged in, skinny body and all. As I wrestled—doing my best Superfly impersonations, leaping off the downed logs that stood in for the ropes—I began to feel a heaviness in my gut. It became intensely clear that the Boy Scouts menu of the previous twenty-four hours—which consisted of baked beans and instant oatmeal—was a force to be reckoned with.
I started running as fast as I could away from the other scouts. Sprinting into the forest, I wanted to put as much distance between them and myself, given their proclivity for turning bowel movements into a spectator sport. As I sped along, I miscalculated the timing, and in a moment I can only describe as sheer horror, it happened. I pooped my pants.
I stopped running, frozen. I hurriedly unbuckled my belt and slid my Lee jeans off my hips. My underwear was smeared. I didn’t know what to do. I looked wildly around. Nothing. I began to waddle, contaminated pants around my ankles, through the forest, looking for something to use to clean myself. Hot tears began to well up.
To this day, whenever someone mentions the Boy Scouts, this is the image that comes to mind. Me waddling through the forest, soiled pants around my ankles, crying. I eventually found some leaves and cleaned myself up the best I could. And in a moment of what I can only guess was inspired by some deep sense of economy that my parents had instilled, I cleaned my underwear as best I could, then carried it back with me to camp and stuffed the offending article deep into my backpack. I don’t recall if I was afraid of my parents’ wrath if I had thrown it out, or if I was worried that leaving the underwear out in the woods would invite detection if found (how anyone would know it was mine I never considered), but whatever the reason, I stowed the smelly underwear in my pack and carried it around for the next few days.
When I got home at the end of my trip, I buried my backpack deep in a corner of our basement and quit the Scouts immediately.
Years later, when I was no longer a smooth-cheeked youth but instead a morose, zitty teenager, my father and I commenced a project where we poured a concrete floor in the basement, which until then had been dirt. Prepping meant cleaning out everything, and as we carried out old furniture and moldy, swollen cardboard boxes filled with the detritus of life, I never once remembered the backpack. Until, of course, I heard my dad say something to the effect of “Hey, your old scout pack,” followed by “Gah!” barked in a tone of disgust. “Jesus Christ. What the hell’s in your backpack?” I stared back at him in the gloom of the basement, my arms full of a broken lamp. Looked him straight in the eye. “I have no idea,” I said.
The Scouts had not been a good fit. It wasn’t that I had anything against helping old ladies across the street per se, but the whole thing smacked vaguely of militaristic fetishism. The hierarchies, uniforms, badges—not my style. I developed, early on, an appreciation of outdoor spaces as a way of eroding authority, of exploding hierarchies.
While I was still in high school, I devoured the requisite books that feed the wanderlusting soul—On the Road, Leaves of Grass—which did wonders for my imagination but wreaked havoc on my grades. As I reached my most surly teenage years, I became so enamored by the romanticism of the open road—a close cousin to the wilderness expedition in spirit and form—I thought the purest way to live, to really be alive, was with a rucksack and extended thumb, dusty boots headed down some lonesome highway.