the summer of "shake and bake"

my 16th summer was a momentous growing season for me. it was a summer of such drastic duality that i termed it "shake and bake", to try to simplify a rather complex and varying set of experiences. in a nut shell, i went from an all out wilderness experience with 4 days spent alone on an island near the arctic freaking circle, to an august that most resembled the movie "Kids" without the Aids spreading part. not only was this crazy summer right in the middle of the age where childhood starts to recede and a young adult is left staring bewildered into a grand future full of possibility, but it was also a study in wacked out scheduling. it was a time in my life where my flare for trouble, and rampant anti-authoritarianism (a polite way of saying that i was a dip shit), had started to become more then just anecdotal amusement and was tipping into flat out dangerous and stupid. Ninja star throwing nighttime bike rides through central park had matured into graffiti writing and drinking 40's with kids who were REALLY rough, and not just "edgy" like me and my closest friends.

I also had developed something of a habit for exposing myself. that sounds deviant and disturbing, but if you can picture two trains pulling into the 168th street station at rush hour. the uptown train being full of worker bees coming home to the outer boroughs and on the other side an empty train carrying some little lord fauntleroys from school in the bronx to manhattan (that was me). now picture one of these kids suddenly jumping up onto the seats and spinning while dropping trou and pressing a young, very white ass against the Plexiglas windows. then picture the wide eyed astonishment and pointing that happens as all the adults going home get a closeup of said booty just as the downtown train pulls out. i guess that if kids did that these days they would get busted by some cell phone with video capability. we were free of those fun killing gadgets back then. you could get away with just about anything. at the age of 16 i had already made a habit of smoking cigarettes, and even blunts (joints rolled in a cigar wrapper) ON THE TRAIN. get on a train these days and just ponder how much shit has changed if kids were doing that in the 80's. so, considering the perfect getaway, and the sheer audacity of the act by a minor. instead of being outrageous, illegal, and disturbing, it was just plain funny. if i remember correctly, most of the faces on the other side of the window seemed to agree, even those who only got to see the skinny buns flash by as the trains accelerated.

also, i guess i should mention another kind of fun with body parts that might REALLY upset some folks. we, and i use the term loosely, because it was more often me and maybe one or two other people who did this, but we developed a fun activity that later in life would have maybe gotten me a sex offense conviction, but at a young tender age is just laughable. we called it "hanging a brain". it was simply to pull one of my just barely pubescant balls out of my pants and let it dangle, and i mean just one ball nice and daintily so as not to get it caught in the zipper, then go up to a restaurant window with people eating inside, and pretend to read the menu until it becomes obvious that the "whats wrong with this picture?" has clearly been answered by those inside. then of course one had to quickly escape because it was not as easy as just being on the downtown train. i was very good at running away at that age. the fight or flight instinct was VERY sharp if you were a teenage boy on the upper west side in the 80's. i think i must have been chased once a day at least. often for doing absolutely nothing except being in the wrong place at the wrong time, at the wrong age.

so it was stuff like that that ended up getting me into a fair amount of trouble at school. it was this friction with my highschool dean that somehow parle'd itself into me getting signed up for a 2 month northern trek through the canadian wilderness with Outward Bound. And i am not talking about the 2 week sailing excursion. i am talking about the ill, learn how to survive with just a stone and a pair of canvas socks, while navigating by stars and eating ant eggs for nourishment. there were no less then two convicted felons and one completely lost and confused german tourist in the group, and absolutely no girls. plus, upon arrival in international falls, minnesota. at the frozen ass crack of this great country i was searched for weapons, drugs, cigarettes and other stuff. promptly stripped of anything i considered fun and then told that we would be 4-5 days from the nearest person/phone/getaway car/cigarette meaning that even a splinter could be life threatening.

in retrospect, i think i remember being shown the catalog with really cute pics of girls and boys frolicking around with canoes. i signed up for the crazy thing gladly because the summer before, my most incredible mom had gotten me on a bike trip through england and france. there i learned about drinking wine in french fields of sunflowers and wooing a beautiful young boston girl on my trip with wildflowers and acts of chivalry. i have cute memories of fixing her flat tires in the rain and swimming across a rapidly flowing loire river to retrieve her lost kayak paddle. all this culminated into a blossomed summer romance. one that had us making out under the pont nuef with a man playing the saxophone across the seine river. it was pretty much perfect. so of course i said yes, thinking this was going to be the woodsy version of the previous summer. but nooooo. it was lord of the flies.

some of my memories from that trip are actually great. there were incredible moments, like crossing a huge lake with 3 foot waves in the middle of the night. the sky was blazing red and green from the aurora borealis, and that incredible palette was being reflected by the dark turbulent water to make a scene that might best be described as a native indian shaman's vision quest, or Van Gogh's Starry Night. i also remember some of the most breathtaking sunrises, one of them being seen from a huge palisade that we had just rock climbed in pre-dawn light. but then there are other memories that are exciting, but less pretty. like the time i had an epic, almost to the death, fight with one of the felons over some dried apples that i caught him stealing. i just asked him to share, because stealing really isn't what bothered me, it was that i wasn't enjoying them too. it was the kind of battle that really defines what battles actually are. especially when you are alone in the woods without any hope of having somebody break it up. at one point he grabbed a stick but i tackled him before he could get a good swing and the two of us rolled down a rock and fell into a lake. at that point it got even worse. now drowning and head dunking become a very frightening reality. i literally felt like it was him or me.

when something goes this far, something that should terrify me, not just the pain, but the unanswered question of how this will end. i get calm. something that i have always found weird. like time slowing down and a super sharp cold logic replaces panic and excitement. it happens to me during car accidents, fights, and basically just before catastrophe. my theory about this is related to a childhood spent having earth shattering ear infections. basically, at an early age, mercilessly early, i developed very bad ears. i quickly found out that pain was personal and couldn't be shared. essentially that in the worst moments, we are completely alone with our pain. i don't get these infections anymore, and maybe if i got them today it wouldn't seem as bad as i remember. but from the impression i got, it was the ninth gate of hell. after you grow up with that, not much will make you panic. like the idea of getting hurt is a bit upsetting, and my brain quickly tries to avoid the danger by thinking clearly on what to do. but the bottom line to me is that whatever is coming at me, be it a fist, or a car roof, its not going to hurt as much as those fucking infections. having my eardrum slowly burst from pressure, and sometimes for me it was both fuckers simultaneously, left me kind of pissed as a teenager and dangerously courageous. but i digress. this fight i was having was on the level of gladiators. as if the dried apples (which i wouldn't even think about eating now) were so important that neither of us would back down until one had killed or disabled the other. luckily for the two of us, our leader, who i would compare to rambo and wolverine in both stature and demeanor, came flying out of the woods and dove into the water to knock us both back. i think he even did it with one hand while the other was holding the group's all important map. he became my best friend on that trip, the guy i fought for apples.

another exciting moment came in the form of another near death experience. we were on a canoe trek in the land of thousands and thousands of lakes. some were connected but most were not and to make the distance we needed to travel we had to cut a straight line through a very NOT straight terrain. this forced us to carry the food and canoes through thick woods sometimes, sometimes the thick woods was very marshy. which leads to my experience with quick sand, or quick mud since it wasn't sandy in the sense of beach sand. in order not to bunch up on the long trails we gave each person 15-20 minutes to get ahead of the person behind them. and you either carried a large bag of food or you wore the canoe upside down on your head. so in this event i was the guy carrying the canoe. i was making pretty good time going through a marshy area. by then we had learned a lot about the environment, survival stuff, first aid, life guard certification. i kid you not about this stuff, it was really hardcore. so i was making sure that footing was solid by walking on vegetation and roots wherever i could find them. i think i remember i was rapping at the time. i knew the complete lyrics to Slick Rick's Children Story and often started belting them out when i found myself alone in the woods. so i must have taken my eye off the ball for a second because mid beat box i stepped into what looked like solid ground and promptly sunk down passed my waist before i figured out what happened. luckily for me, since i kept on sinking and had as of yet found nothing solid in the muck to grab onto, my canoe had caught on a rock up front and the back was wedged between a tree and a root. so as i sank i realized that if i locked my arm around the upside down seat of the canoe, it might hold me out of the depths of the mud. it did, only i didn't realize just how heavy i would be in that stuff and my arm lock was quickly painful.

i forgot to mention the mosquitoes up there can bite through rain coats and fly in packs of a thousand, and leeches were the size of a section of banana peel and had a sense of smell or something that led them right to you even in a white water river. so within a minute i was holding on for dear life, stuck UNDER a flipped canoe and when the swarm of mosquitoes and leeches found me i couldn't even use a finger to shoo them. i got to watch them feast away for about 15 minutes. i knew i was in a precarious situation, but the emotion i remember having was annoyance. like how could all these elements come together in such a way to leave me in so ridiculous a situation?! what were the mother flippin' odds that this was happening? i was from manhattan for christ's sake!

i can't say if time slowed down for me then, because it seemed like FOREVER before i heard the steps of the guy behind me get close. i was about to scream to him when i heard him say, "that fucking asshole just leaves his canoe here?". he didn't know i hadn't left the scene yet because i was under the canoe and the canoe had basically settled on the ground. needless to say, i made it out alive, missing about a quart of blood. the leeches had really done a number, thankfully i was unaware of just how many of them had latched onto me until i climbed out and started rinsing the mud off. it was very gory. my privates were untouched, in case the movie Stand By Me is coming to mind.

there are a lot of things that happened on that trip, most of them came with rewards of one kind or another, even the bad moments were used by me as building blocks for who i have become. i know that sounds kind of cheezy and a little bit like the crap i was reading in that full of shit catalog. but it's true. no pain, no gain. there were incredible moments like the time me and the guy who i fought with, were way behind the group, like a whole lake behind. when all of a sudden, an amphibious plane comes out of nowhere and lands near us. the pilot climbs out and starts smoking. of course, we paddle over to ask for a cigarette. the guy, a canadian official was taking minnow counts for some canadian government agency and was happy to give us a bunch of cigs after we explained our most dire situation. those cigarettes, which we hid and enjoyed for a whole week, were like the best things i have ever tasted. it makes me tear up just thinking about them, especially since i have quit and would give up my pinky if it meant i could smoke again and not worry about little things like death.

So after that journey, i flew back to new york with nothing to do for most of august until school started. I remember showing up in sheep's meadow (my crew's favorite base camp in the park) with the largest muscles i had ever had, and the kind of tan a homeless man in southern california has after years of sleeping in sunny public parks all day. it was at the exact moment that i re-united with my friends that marked the end of the "shake" part, and the beginning of the "bake". by the end of that month of being with these guys, my toxin free, perfectly toned body would become a pickled, alcohol-laced, drug storage unit.

while i had been fighting mystery mammals for the limited food on an island the size of a basketball court, my dufus crew of friends had happened upon a new substance which immediately changed everything. LSD.

i had been witnessing crazy electro magnetic lights in the sky up north, coincidentally, my friends were seeing the same thing right here on broadway. So, naturally i signed on as a fellow tripper. it was a scary, absolutely insane thing to do to a 16 year old mind that had just survived the canadian wild. but thats what made it so perfect for us. my group of friends was always very competitive. we were always competing in one way or another. with art/graffiti, girlfriends, skate boarding, you name it. so scrambling reality became the new front where we would put our minds and bodies to the test. we actually got so regular at it that we developed specific activities, like painting all night, or spending the entire night in the park, or, as we did that first fateful day, going to the museum of natural history. a better place to have a LSD trip has never been invented. Add the fact that i spent my childhood loving that museum to death and slowly had lost interest in it around that time. suddenly it was a new exciting place again.

rarely have i read or seen what a trip on that drug really feels like, except for maybe Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. it's SO powerful when you are in it that even looking at a patch of grass seems to reveal whole layers of complexity to the grass that its as if you have never seen it before. its like suddenly the every day, mundane facade of life melts away and everything really truly reveals itself to be so much more. if you look at sand or marble, the very grains and veins of rock seem alive and they pulse to the beat of your heart. looking back i sometimes wonder if that is the only time you see the truth or if that's the only time you DON'T see the truth. had you asked me back then, i would have said that what you see on acid is actually what is happening. like the stuff activates your real senses which are usually dumbed down so you don't get completely fucking overwelmed by a puddle or a stick. because if you really think about a puddle or a stick, they are in fact extremely complex objects that only exist because the exact elements have come together at exactly the right moment to present itself to you. i spent hours in the gem room just trying to wrap my head around the rocks. we were running around like idiot kids haveing a blast. at one point we walked down a hall and my friend Self pointed out that a large poster display was breathing. we all agreed that it was moving for us. it was only after a group of tourists walked over to see what had us so amazed that we remembered how different our perception was to normal peoples. the tourists shuffled away from us very fast. we then proceeded to get kicked out of the naturemax show (precursor to IMAX) because we wouldn't stop laughing at the volcanoes. it's an amazing memory for me. i would NEVER try LSD now, but it really did open up my mind to a whole new world. It removed the static nature of perception. so it was a summer where i built up perception, and then tore that f'er down.

so that was one bat shit crazy summer.