Live Oak Blues What happens.

13 is a brutal age no matter what, but even more so if you were 13 in 1976 and had to spend two weeks at a Boy Scout Summer Camp. The good stuff: I learned that I could swim a mile in rough water, rescue a grown man from drowning, sail, use an outhouse without falling in, and other survival skills such as avoiding a swarm of hornets by outrunning the fattest kid in my group. Similarly, I also learned that I could survive as a congenital wiseass by hanging out with an even worse wiseass.

We called him Bilbo and he was my best friend at the time. Somehow I had convinced him to come with me to summer camp, as I correctly doubted my ability to make new friends while I was there. Bilbo had what could be politely called a “distrust of authority” that took the form of a habitual, dismissive laugh along with the complete inability to restrain himself from shouting “bullshit” at the slightest provocation. The counselors did not like Bilbo, and their shocked reactions to his outbursts turned to thin-lipped glares as the weeks went on.

On the last night of camp, I awoke to group laughter and someone jarring my cot. As my eyes adjusted, I saw that our tent had transformed from a two-person tent to a three-, four-, five-, six-, seven-person tent. Bilbo was still on his cot, but for reasons my sleepy brain couldn’t work out, he was naked and face down, lashed to the frame with thin, cotton rope–the same kind of rope on which we had mastered the bowline and sheepshank. He was covered, inexplicably, in shaving cream, toilet paper, and urine. Whatever cobwebs I still struggled through disappeared with the twack of a canoe paddle on Bilbo’s bare ass.

At once, the misshapen, acne-ravaged face of a counselor we called Pugsly filled my view. “This is funny as hell,  right?” My sense of self-preservation, already at full throttle, recognized this as the password request that it was. “Yes,” I heard myself say, “this is funny as hell.” This night, my ass would remain free of urine, shaving cream, and canoe paddles, Bilbo be damned. As they filed away and Bilbo’s sobs began in earnest, I stole away to the Scoutmaster’s tent and woke him to tell him what happened. Any sense of justice and authority I harbored in the wake of this trauma vanished as he said “Bilbo’s an asshole”…and then went back to sleep.Thus at 13, I learned the lesson we all must: no one is actually driving this bus we’re on. Get used to it and count yourself lucky simply to survive.

Bilbo and I never discussed this incident again, but I always wondered if he had the same night terrors that I did for the next few years. I don’t regret my decision not to take on five counselors (Eagle Scouts among them) armed with paddles, but I have struggled with what I’d be willing to sacrifice in similar situations. I’d like to think that I am no longer the coward I once was at 13, but who knows?