Bodajate laager

I was rummaging through the attic yesterday and found a letter I’d written to my parents from summer camp during some time in the eighties. I’m sure that a lot of you shared that experience when you were growing up, but this camp was a little different in that it was a bodybuildingcamp.

Here’s the letter in its entirety. I offer it as a reminder of a kinder, simpler time:

Dear Mom and Dad,

I want to tell you about my first week at Camp Ruptured Pec. There sure is a lot to do but I’m not sure I like too much of it. There are weird people here, especially the counselors. The other day I was taking a shower and this counselor named Joe Weeder or something walks in, starts taking his clothes off and asks me, “Young man, you ever seen a grown man naked?”

It made me kind of nervous so I got out of there as fast as I could.

I was kind of hoping this camp would be like the Indian camp you sent me to last year where I learned how to canoe and make baskets out of straw. Sure, we do stuff here but it’s all centered around learning how to be a bodybuilder. For instance, you know how I told you we went on snipe hunts last year? Well, what we do here is kind of a snipe hunt, I guess. Last night one of the bodybuilder/counselors gave us sacks and told us we were going hunting for “Mike Mentser’s abs.”

The counselor, a big guy named Ahnuld who talked real funny, explained that Mentser’s abs were a “mythical beast that had never been seen before,” and then he started laughing until some protein drink came out of his nose.

We were supposed to flush Mike Mentser’s abs out of the bushes and when one of us caught them we were supposed to yell “Ollie, Ollie oxen free, I’ve got the fat bastard’s abs!”

We all ran around the woods for a while with our sacks but it wasn’t very much fun, especially for this one counselor who was named Mike Mentser. I guess it was a coincidence or something that he had the same name. Anyhow, for some reason, he just got madder and madder, especially when that Ahnuld guy kept pointing at him and laughing.

I was alone for one part of the hunt and that Joe Weeder guy game up to me in the dark holding his sack in front of him and saying, “I caught them, little man! They’re in here! Here! Feel around in my gunny sack!” He had this creepy look on his face and it looked like his pants were unbuckled so I told him that I had a tummy ache and asked if I could please be excused.

During the day we have lessons on how to do bodybuilding type stuff. Like we all had to put acorns between our buttcheeks, scrunch our head into our neck, and walk around with our arms spread out. I guess that’s how bodybuilders are supposed to walk. Anyhow, if the acorn fell out, everybody would form a circle around you and shout, “Pencilneck!” over and over again until you started crying.

Then we were taught how to give bodybuilding compliments like, “Nice guns,” and “Good wheels,” and learned how you’re supposed to say, “You fuckin’ got that right, bubba,” to be polite.

They also taught us this Indian trick where you drink a lot of water before you go to bed and how you’ll wake up three or four hours later because you have to take a pee. That way, you can “ingest protein to keep you in an anabolick instead of a catabolick state.”

I tried it and sure enough it worked! I got up to take a pee and eat some jerky but when I came back to the tent it looked like something was lying next to my sleeping bag. It was too dark to tell for sure but I think it was that Mr. Weeder again because I heard a voice say, “I’m just a pile of clothes you left next to your sleeping bag.” I got scared and slept in the woods.

On Tuesday we took turns sitting in a small cave with nothing but some Weeder Weight Gain Powder, a flashlight, and something called a “stroke mag” that had pictures of naked girls in it. I’m not sure why we did it, but one of the counselors said that bodybuilders sometimes have to live in their cars and that this would “prepare us for that eventuality.”

Most of the kids I’ve met are okay. I’ve made two friends, “Thor” and “Meat,” and we hang around together a lot. There’s one kid, though, that we all think is kid of weird. His name is Billy Phillips and he spends most of the day making “supplements” out of dirt and bird poo-poo and then selling them to some of the dumber kids. Then a couple of other kids called the Bleckman twins stole the idea and started selling it to other kids.

One thing I do like is our nightly campfire. We sing songs like:

99 bottles of stanozolol on the wall,

99 bottles of stanozolol,

Take one down, pass it around,

98 bottles of stanozolol on the wall…

It’s pretty cool. Last night we kept singing until there were 22 bottles of stanozolol on the wall, but then the veins on this one kid’s neck got all bulgy — I think his name is Timmy Patterson — and he started hitting us with a big tree branch while telling us all to “shut the hell up.”

Afterwards we told ghost stories but the first one they told us wasn’t very scary. Mr. Mentser started telling one about how this brave handsome gladiator from America had competed in some contest and instead of winning, a bunch of trolls gave first place to some “big Austrian dork.”

The story itself wasn’t too scary, but while Mr. Mentser was telling it he started pulling out pieces of his hair and moustache and that kind of freaked everybody out a little. That Ahnuld guy was there, too, and just laughed the whole time. He laughs a lot for some reason.

Then they told this other one about some bodybuilder who had been doing squats with a thousand pounds and blown out his guts and died and now he walks around the woods looking for little kids to help him stuff his guts back in!

That one got me pretty scared, especially when I heard something rustling behind me. It wasn’t the guy with the spilled guts, though, it was only Mr. Weeder hiding in the bushes. He was whispering something about wanting to show me a muscle that was “particularly thick and veiny.”

I threw a rock at him and ran.

Well, I have to go to bed now but I’ll write some more tomorrow.

Love,

Your son, TC

Allikas