Danny was one of the counselors at camp. My parents thought it would be a good idea to send my brother and myself away for the summer, and, for this purpose, they chose the camp at which my elder cousins were already successful and popular senior counselors. This had two advantages: It was Jewish, and, accordingly, it was cheap. The dining hall was kosher, and Shabbos services were compulsory. However, what they had not reckoned was that the authentic Jewish camp experience they had planned for me would turn out to be Auschwitz.

I was what charitable people might call a "late bloomer." The less charitable, who included everyone except my mother, might call me "fucking pathetic." Early press-ganging onto a little league team, where I realized the full potential of young boys to themselves be extensions of their fathers' penises, had filled me with a horror of anything remotely resembling athleticism. A large part of my childhood was spent in my own head, re-reading The Lord of the Rings and eating microwavable chicken burritos. My clothes were purchased at what was euphemistically called "the husky boy's shop." At camp, my lack of ability in physical pursuit and lack of social skills instantly marked me for ostracism. Fearing contagion, even my own cousins and younger brother avoided me.

To contrast, none of our sixteen-year-old overseers doubted that Danny Kaplan, the skinny boy-man with the spiky hair with the johnson larger than the rest of him, was the king of us all. After all, he had the scepter. Lord of his domain, Danny would arise every morning and, stark naked, stride to the porch of the 400-year-old Dutch mansion that served as our barracks. There, he would release a mighty stream of urine into the front yard. Where that golden shower touched, the earth was forever blackened and sterile. No grass would grow there, but the unlucky camper who incurred the displeasure of the counselors might find himself forced to hold a push-up position over that accursed spot for up to an hour.

In Herman Wouk's The City Boy, the fat, awkward Jewish kid ultimately triumphs. My summer camp experience wasn't written by Herman Wouk. It was written by William Golding. In the communal shower at camp, my own peter, like a micolithic version of the mighty Galapagos tortoise, would retreat, ashamed, into my hairless groin. Though, without my glasses, my bunkmates were only blurry, indistinct forms, I could hear their laughter perfectly clearly. They were young and athletic and lean, with flat, muscular stomachs and cruel eyes. They would meet the girls from the other side of camp by the lake at night, there to rehearse the production of the next generation of Jewish campers. Alone with the mosquitoes, I would cry myself to sleep every night.

At the inevitable camp shows, while my bunkmates aimed punches at my short ribs while my back was turned, Danny would sit in the back of the barn and slyly suck himself off. He would hug his erection to himself with both arms like a little boy with a puppy he was trying to keep concealed from his mother, his dickhead protruding from the neckline of his sweater. When he was sure that none of the head counselors were watching, he would whip it out and slap it against his hand like a billy club, perhaps knocking a few of the smaller children unconscious with it. Onstage, Tevye worried in vain about marrying off his daughters, because the female half of the camp was watching Danny like mice hypnotized by a snake. Why so many nice Jewish girls chose to lose their virginity to that thing, I'll never know, since it must have been like being fucked with a Buick. Danny got more play than a basketball in an inner-city gym class, not that the virgin sacrifices satisfied his appetite for conquest of various sorts. I won't say that he paid any special attention to me, but he didn't neglect me either.

"You have nice tits," he said to me one sunset evening. "I think I want to titty-fuck you."

Psychic trauma aside, Danny Kaplan's penis taught me many life lessons. The first and most obvious, of course, is that all men are not created equal. The second is that I am not, in any wise, inclined towards homosexuality. And, if I ever was meant to be gay by nature or nurture, then I should be awarded the Southern Baptist equivalent of the Nobel Prize for finding the cure: Threaten to titty-fuck the fat kid with a monster cock, and they'll never even shower in front of other guys ever again.

'Course, Danny Kaplan's penis wasn't the only life lesson I learned. The camp had been in continuous operation since the early 1900s, and a lot of the stuff they called "tradition" had settled on the remains, much as vultures settle on a bloated, rotting carcass. These "traditions" included the inane songs and cheers, the death marches they called "hikes," the Friday night shabbos services, the Saturday night mockery of Broadway shows (Broadway is another great Jewish tradition), and the weeding out of the weak.

One of the oldest traditions was the camp's directrix, who was upwards of 80 years old at the time I was there. As I still haven't received reports of her death, she must by pulling for the Guinness Book of World Records by now. She had been in one of the original groups of campers who had been brought to the upstate farm back during World War I, when New York City was no longer safe because the Germans were dropping diseased livestock from zeppelins or some shit like that. She reigned iron-fisted over every aspect of camp life, or at least she did whenever she wasn't taking a nap. She was also one of the only adults at the camp: Our counselors were all 18 or younger, and the head counselors were college students. Youth culture reigned supreme, which is to say that the kids ran the camp with the typical callous cruelty of children everywhere, of which I was personally the main target.

And boy, does cruelty take up a lot of energy. However, because a grand total of perhaps $3.82 had been spent in securing provisions for the summer (Jews being notoriously cheap), camp food was like dining at the old-age home. Nowhere else have I seen cottage cheese and Jell-O passed off as a meal. Even suffering through this haute cuisine, however, was far better than what happened when corn was served, for then we were given a lengthy speech on importance of chewing your corn THIRTY-TWO TIMES. This speech was given by our beloved Directrix, who had a podium and microphone set up at the front of the hall for this express purpose, and it never varied. Our digestion was of paramount importance. Dire consequences attended any camper who chewed any mouthful of corn less than thirty-times, including, but not limited to, tummy-ache, constipation, bloating, scurvy, and testicular cancer. Yes sir, if there was anything I learned in camp, besides that other children did not believe my fat, socially unskilled self fit to walk the same earth as them, it was that you had to chew your corn THIRTY-TWO TIMES.

The food at camp was prepared by three black migrant workers, headed by a salty old soul named Ritchie. (And by "salty," I mean that every word out of his head was "goddamn motherfucker.") The only Caucasian graduate of that school of culinary mad science, whom we nicknamed "Cowboy," didn't last long on account of his habit of talking to the food. Other staff included Leroy, who was a good ol' boy from down south who was paid to sweep and mop up after us and Walter the Gardener. We would steal Walter's tools and run away when he wasn't looking. If we got caught, though, we would have to paint rocks white with him. Pearl had an obsession with white rocks. The damn camp was lousy with 'em.

Ritchie himself had only worked his entire life, barely been to school, and made no bones about it that he had little use for soft white kids who didn't know how to work and were going to grow up and do nothing harder than sit at desks and get fat all day. It was rumored that he was actually homeless when camp wasn't in session. Since Ritchie only had three teeth left in his head, he couldn't actually eat the food he cooked (and I use the term "cooked" loosely). This made him somewhat bitter. Whenever someone asked him "What's for dinner," he'd respond, "Bacon and eggs, you goddamn motherfucker." This was highly unlikely, considering the camp was kosher, but it does give you an idea of Ritchie's mindset.

Ritchie and the other help lived in a little bungalow right out of "The Cider House Rules." Evenings, they would sit there and drink beer and smoke (occasionally cigarettes, but mostly pot). Ritchie would read the newspaper, or at least look at the pictures (since we weren't sure he could read), while the rest of the staff, most of who had been to prison at least once, worked out with weights improvised out of cinder blocks.

The cooks were forbidden to speak to the campers (GOD FORBID SOME 16-YEAR-OLD JEWISH GIRL WOULD LOSE HER VIRGINITY TO ONE OF THESE GUYS!!!) but sometimes, when I managed to escape my tormentors, I managed to join them. Ritchie made no bones about it that I was a useless little butterball—he had probably been picking cotton, slaughtering hogs, and fathering children at my age—but he tolerated my presence, possibly because he sensed I was also an outsider of sorts in that closed little society, or possibly because my cousin was the head counselor.

"Hey, kid," he asked me one day. "Whaddya wanna be when you grow up?"

"I wanna be famous," I said instantly. "I wanna be on MTV. I want people to remember me after I'm gone."

Actually, what meant was "I want everyone to love me," and I think Ritchie understood that as he dismissed my rock-star dreams with a snort. "What good'll it do you? You'll still be dead. Stupid little goddamned motherfucker."