“Skip Camp Maccabee,” I wrote in my notes on this part of my life, “nothing important happened there, and it’s all unspeakable.” But I was forgetting the medals when I wrote that. The five medals became a buried dynamite charge that, touched off by my bar mitzva, blew my life apart like a land mine. There is no leaving out Camp Maccabee.
This camp in the Catskills, where I won the medals, was the brainchild of one Mr. Dresser. If Peter Quat were telling this, he could make of Samuel Dresser the most loathsome literary Jew since Fagin, but Mr. Dresser was just another paunchy little cheeseparer like Mr. Seidman. He hired Charles Strongfort, “the world’s most perfect man,” as director. The camp featured body-building, and was called Camp Strongfort at first. That didn’t go, so after a losing year Mr. Dresser changed the name to Camp Maccabee, and made it kosher. Strongfort stayed on, and since he was a devout Catholic who always wore a crucifix on his gigantic hairy brown chest, Mr. Dresser took on a former Jewish boxing champion, Benny Leonard, as “athletic adviser.” He also cut his prices in half. Everybody in the Bronx knew about Benny Leonard, and I was netted, with some three hundred other boys and girls. Mama, penitent over the Eagle Wing botch, jumped at the kosher inducement; and Pop was in financial hot water again, so the cheap fee got him.
I am compelled, however, to draw a curtain over the incredible doings at Camp Maccabee. I can’t compete with Peter Quat or his Jewish-housewife imitators in the fearless candor racket. I’m shooting for the family trade, and you’ll have to admit I’ve stayed pretty genteel so far. April House is right in there with Little Women, and I mean to keep it that way. The camp was something of a Dotheboys Hall—and Dothegirls Hall, too, because there were hordes of girls—except that we weren’t oppressed, not at all. We could do whatever we pleased. There was no barrier of any sort between the boys’ and the girls’ camps, and what pleased all of the counsellors, and most of the campers past puberty, was sex. It was something wild, Camp Maccabee, and not what my parents had in mind in giving me a kosher summer.
I trust the family trade will put up with my merely mentioning, for instance, that the head counsellor, one Uncle Jack, a tall lean bespectacled fellow, was known to one and all as the Scumbag King. This was not meant in derogation. It was descriptive. He pressed one of the seniors into service as a sort of batman, and this kid got into Uncle Jack’s trunk and found an astonishing number of the things, several thousand of them. They could not have all been for personal use; the camp season was too short. I must presume that Uncle Jack had the concession, and sold them to the other counsellors and to selected campers; in which case Mr. Dresser certainly had a piece of the action. Mr. Dresser would not have overlooked such a profitable spin-off from Camp Maccabee.
In my bunk the campers were too young to patronize Uncle Jack, but they displayed such a lively interest in sex, all the same, that I had to move out. I couldn’t stand it. I wasn’t a prude then and still am not, but there was this stout boy named Whitey that my bunkmates kept trying to bugger, when they weren’t comparing lengths of erections, and doing other things even old Peter would have trouble making believable. It was like living in a monkey house with a lot of depraved orangutans. I didn’t know when they might tire of Whitey and cast their hot eyes on me. So one day I just packed up my trunk and carried it over to the tent of Uncle Sam, the dramatics counsellor, where the circumstances seemed quieter.
They were quieter. It was a senior tent, and the campers were away in the girls’ area most of the time. When they came back they were all worn out and just slept. It was days before I was even noticed. Uncle Sam must have been a night prowler, because he slept nearly all the time. I don’t remember seeing him get up for meals. We all tended to eat at odd times, going to the mess hall and foraging around when we got hungry. The scheduled meals were poorly attended, because Mr. Dresser’s menus really were right out of Dotheboys Hall. But there was a canteen, and down the road a ways a sandwich place. Both were open day and night, did a roaring business, and undoubtedly were dummy corporations wholly owned by Mr. Dresser; for the worse the camp meals were, the more he was bound to rake in from those two gold mines.
I came to Uncle Sam’s attention during a week of heavy rains. The seniors kept moving their beds around to get out from under the leaks and a bad leak sprang over Uncle Sam’s head and woke him.
“What are you doing here?” he asked, sitting up and mopping his head with a towel. I was, at the moment, the only camper in the tent. I was pretty wet and bedraggled, because there were no unoccupied dry spots left. I was lying on my soaked bed in my raincoat, reading a book.
“I’m your new camper.”
“What? But you’re just a little kid.” Uncle Sam got up as he talked, shoved a camper’s bed into a puddle under a heavy leak, and moved his cot into the dry place.
“I’m interested in dramatics.”
“Who put you in here?”
“The Scumbag King.”
“Well, that’s all right then. What do you do?”
“I can sing and recite.”
“Good. I can use you.”
But let’s get out of Camp Maccabee fast. I’m just accounting for the medals. I rather enjoyed the anarchy of Maccabee, the freedom to read all I wanted, the absence of athletics—there were casual choose-up games, but no schedules—and to be honest, the sex carnival also entertained me. I think it would have entertained the emperor Caligula. A sort of blithering innocence kept me from any participation in it, but the summer was a great eye-opener.
There were two Parents’ Days, one in July and one in August, when we had fine steak dinners. For the July day Benny Leonard showed up. It was the only time we ever saw him. He gave a mass boxing lesson to two hundred boys, while the parents looked on. A patently silly fraud, it was. That same night Uncle Sam put on a show, and I did a takeoff on Benny Leonard’s boxing lesson. I’d been amusing the kids at rehearsals with such clowning, and Uncle Sam saw this and put me on as a solo act. It made a hit. Benny Leonard in the front row was rolling around, guffawing and wiping his eyes, though my scurrilities were all about how fat and old he was, and how the whole thing was a farce staged for the parents. The parents were laughing, too. Clowns can get away with a lot of truth. Next day Leonard called me into the camp office and gave me the Benny Leonard Proficiency Medal in the Manly Art, picking one out of a large box full of these on Mr. Dresser’s desk. So that was one medal.
At the second Parents’ Day Strongfort did his standard act: rippling his enormous muscles, tearing a telephone book in half, straightening a horseshoe with his bare hands, and all that. It was made for parody, and I was blossoming out as the camp funny man. So that night I lampooned Strongfort. Another hit, and nobody in the audience was more amused than Mama. She and Pop were sitting up front. They had missed the first Parents’ Day, but here they were, and she laughed so loud that my act could have been ruined. Luckily, the campers were starved for some amusement besides lust—the season was winding down and they had all about had it—and they ignored the berserk lady in the front row. After the show, Strongfort invited me and my parents to his tent, and there presented me with the Strongfort Correspondence School Medal for Body-Building Prowess.
Would you believe that Mama took that award seriously? Body-building prowess! I was a physical ruin. That was half the fun of my burlesque. I had been living on candy bars and peanut butter sandwiches, lying indoors and reading day and night. I had scarcely broken into a run the whole time at Camp Maccabee, and I had given up swimming because of the leeches in the lake. I looked like a stunted eunuch, all white and baggy and puffy. But Mama glowed over the medal, and thanked Charles Strongfort, and gave him a kiss. Papa did not say much during the whole visit. When they left next morning in the car, he remarked only that I should try to get a little sun. Mama was gloating over the two medals in her lap, for she had collected the Benny Leonard award, too. “My prizewinner!” she exclaimed, as Pop started the car. Pop looked at me, slightly shook his head, and drove off.
Well, Uncle Sam then awarded me a medal for dramatics, which made three, and one in journalism, for a total of four. There wasn’t much food at Maccabee but medals abounded. About the journalism: Uncle Sam put out just two mimeographed editions of the Maccabee Menorah for the Parents’ Days. Before each occasion he took me to a dusty little office, sat me at a typewriter, with lists of parents who were expected, and a few stencils; and told me to write some gossip about their kids, anything that came into my head, with all names in capital letters. It was fun pecking out words on a machine, and I enjoyed writing up the campers. The hardest part was keeping it clean. I had to press my imagination hard for sex-free items; it was my first try at serious fiction. Toward the end of the second edition I got tired and absentmindedly referred to our head counsellor as the Scumbag King; meaning no harm, I just forgot I was writing for the parents. This caused a few puzzled inquiries, but the summer was waning and nobody really cared much.
A strange experience, Maccabee, and it’s all been coming back to me as I write. Uncle Sam had a long sad face, and Mr. Dresser had a big belly and so did Benny Leonard, though he kept remembering to suck it in. Years later I interviewed Strongfort for one of Harry Goldhandler’s radio shows. I was startled to find him a head shorter than I was. At Camp Maccabee he had seemed a giant.
And the fifth medal? Well, that was on the up and up. When I graduated from public school, I got the gold medal for Excellence in English. I still have it, the gilt is untarnished, and it reads
I. David Goodking
for Excellene
in English
In my lifelong quest for excellence, I’ve usually ended up with that crippled “excellene.”