Thanks, Chuck

Growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, as you may have been told repeatedly, was infinitely better than the subsequent decades. I can’t honestly offer an opinion on the prior decades, as I was not alive then. A friend recently sent a photo of the translucent red plastic cups, from the sit-down era of Pizza Hut, with the caption, “Soda in these hit harder.” A bonafide case of someone attempting to elicit nostalgia in me with an experience I don’t recall. I prefer to stick to my own experiences and my own memories.

The summer of 1980 was unique for me. As the final, accidental offspring in a blended family of ten children, being reared by an occasional Sears lingerie saleswoman and a full-time used car salesman, you might assume there wouldn’t be a lot of leftover money for summer camp. And, you’d be correct. Spoiler alert: I did go to summer camp, and I’ll get to that right after I force you to read about my weird, pseudo-poverty level upbringing.

Despite 1980 being one of the most awesome years ever (as I alluded to earlier), our family lived with very little. This was normal back then. The excess of today hadn’t insinuated itself into American homes yet. There was no internet, cell phones, or Amazon Prime delivering anything and everything in one day or less. There was the mall and the quarter-gobbling arcade, filled with Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, and about a hundred other games I was never any good at. My generous stipend of $1.25 didn’t last long. I recall being a sneaky little brat, wandering the mall with a frantic look of ‘lost child’ on my face, targeting random parental-looking adults for a dime (the price of a payphone call then) to call home. When I’d collected enough dimes, I bought tokens to play more Defender.

My father grew up during the depression; The Great Depression, not one of the more recent, mediocre sequels. This meant extreme frugality was a key objective. When I say extreme, I dip all the way into activities like reusing paper plates, hand-me-down clothes (woefully out of style), and boiling ten gallons of spaghetti, only to add one jar of Ragu.

The first time I saw a plate of pasta that wasn’t merely a pile of slightly stained noodles, I felt downright opulent. Until I lived on my own, I thought “White American” was a bougie upgrade from those blocks of Velveeta-esque government cheese. Thanks, President Reagan! I later learned there are a lot of different cheeses. Who knew?

As a result of living in an era where you actually could raise ten kids on one point five incomes, we became conditioned to the idea of abject thrift. We didn’t know any better, and that was the key. You can’t want things if you don’t know about them. I wonder what percentage of Mom’s efforts went into espionage-related disinformation campaigns to keep us from learning about all the things she couldn’t afford to buy us. If there was a community, city, or state-run program with any sort of freebies for a mother and her kids, my mom got her name on the list.

One of Mom’s more obvious grifts was becoming a member of every church in town. I remember Sundays when we got started too late for mass at the Our Lady of Grace Catholic Church and clandestinely slipped into the back of a later service at some Southern Baptist church.

Jesus will understand, Mom would say.

Appearances at these various denominational houses of worship had made our faces recognizable when the time came for a handout. With practiced sleight of hand, Mom could make the smallest of token donations. You know, that lady who puts a ten in the basket, then takes a five and four ones as change? That was Mom. Her efforts paid off, though, when one of them announced a sponsorship for a free pass to a local boys’ sleepaway summer camp.

As previously spoiled, the summer of 1980 did see me attend such a camp. I can’t recall the exact name or location of the place; somewhere reasonably close to our home in Westport, Massachusetts, no doubt. They called it a summer camp, but it didn’t last all summer. As a ten-year-old, I didn’t understand why not, but as an adult, I do. Two weeks with triple-digit quantities of someone else’s kids is sufficient to send any 80s camp counselor straight back to college.

There was archery, sack races, swimming (in an actual lake!) as well as arts and crafts - who still has the gimp bracelets we made? I remember that participation and good behavior were rewarded with the summer camp equivalent of Green Stamps. These stamps could be traded-in at the nothing-like-a-prison-commissary store for things like; tiny room-temperature cartons of milk, ATOMIC Fireball candies, bags of pretzels, and I say pretzels plural because there were always at least three in each bag. Not more than three, but at least three. I’m sure there were other things, such as bottles of soda, chips, and toys, but I never earned enough stamps for the good stuff. I was forced to subsist on warm milk and fireballs. You may be surprised to know this combination does, in fact, result in tummy troubles. Could’ve been the dairy (was lactose intolerance a ‘real thing’ back in the 80s?) or the hyper-stimulation of my first attempt at horseback riding.

I made friends and enemies at summer camp. Davey was an effeminate, fatherless, tow-headed mamma’s boy that would cry over things like being pushed down, made to flinch, wildflowers, and direct sunlight. He was smart and funny, but I think the best thing about him was how, thanks to him attracting the attention of the camp bully, I became the alpha male in our group. There was also a healthy selection of Timmys, Jimmys, and Tonys. All interchangeable in their pre-pubescent boy disguises.

Then there was Chuck. Remember those reward stamps? If Chuck had them, he strong-armed them from any number of kids like Davey. Choose any cliché bully from any book or movie you know and stick Chuck’s freckled face and ginger beezer on them. For those that didn’t grow up with that term, in this context, a beezer is akin to a crew cut, maybe a little shorter. Chuck was the sort of kid that liked to cause a ruckus during meals. He’d mess with your food by sticking his Dirty-Chuck-Fingers in your mashed potatoes, sprinkle dirt over your creamed corn, or hock a loogie in your tiny milk carton—the usual. On at least two occasions, he started a full-blown food fight. More on that later.

As I have made clear, food at home was a bland affair, and I’m not saying that Southern Baptist Sleepaway Camp cuisine was a Michelin Star experience. Still, in general, I rather enjoyed the variety of semi-exotic-to-me dishes. Growing up with a Portuguese dad and an Irish mom meant a minimum of one hundred percent of my meals were boiled. Having fried chicken, pizza, and even fish was a breakthrough. Creamed corn I had at home. I knew that one.

After a particularly intense rivalry surrounding the final day of mini-Olympics, which in hindsight, was quite brilliantly orchestrated to leverage all the things we’d learned over the previous thirteen days, everyone sat, exhausted, for one final meal. The food on the plate in front of me was, of course, comprised of the choices I made in the chow line. You may have gleaned that I wasn’t raised to be overly adventurous concerning food. My culinary escapades thus far at camp had been overstimulating by my standards, yet I still operated well within my safe zone.

I sat, over-tired with my tray of comfort food, at the long picnic table accompanied by somewhere between thirty and three hundred other ten-year-old boys. We fidgeted and cracked wise while we choked down one last not-a-mom meal. I’d just finished my second helping of fried chicken and Boston Baked Beans when I was smacked in the forehead with an airborne rectangular piece of pepperoni pizza. I couldn’t see the slice, mind you, stuck to my face like one of those toxic, paper-thin plastic 1970s Halloween masks, but I knew it was pizza by the smell and the distinctive way the sauce stung my eyes. I also knew the shape was rectangular, and toppings pepperoni for that matter, because I’d eaten some before the fried chicken (which my ten-year-old brain assured me was the proper order to eat them, regardless of the lukewarm milk).

I’d had my share of appointments with the belt, so getting involved in a food fight at Southern Jesus Baptist Bible Camp wasn’t something I’d normally consider. What the heck, I thought. This was the final meal before going home. There would be no more stamps, no more ATOMIC Fireballs, and (hopefully) no more sermons. I peeled the slice off my face and searched the sea of scrawny flailing arms, pointy elbows, and the occasionally well-if-not-overfed boys for the sender.

Chuck. Of course. After two weeks of rivalry, attempted bullying, and trading insults about each other’s moms, Chuck had managed to lure me to the Dark Side. I let his half-eaten pizza slough down my face onto my segmented dinner tray. He smiled an antagonistic, gap-toothed smile at me. The sort of face that begs to be pummeled (with food). Using my spork, like a well-heeled socialite, I scooped the remainder of my beans onto the interloping slice and wadded my edible artillery up for safe travels.

By now, enough food to save some of the villages I’d heard about on TV (for less than the price of a cup of coffee!) had sailed through the air, hitting targets. The shrill screams of young boys misbehaving flooded the area, along with chicken bones, cornbread, more pizza, the occasional chocolate milk, and three different colors of jello.

I set my sights on Chuck, cocked my arm, and let the bean-grenade fly. He was caught off guard. The food bomb hit him square in the chest and splattered the sticky brown bean sauce up under his chin. Chuck’s head whipped back and forth like the chair umpire at Wimbledon, scanning the table for the sender. When we made eye contact, I smiled proudly, did a little dance, and mouthed, “bring it on.”

Not counting the piles of errant food, which had started to grow around everyone, Chuck had nothing left on his plate but his dessert. One of those little baked pies in the little tin plates. My chosen dessert was what I thought was tapioca pudding. My dessert turned out to be rice pudding. And, although today I am a big fan, at ten, the bait and switch was more than I was willing to tolerate. I had no reservations about tossing the fraudulent cup his way.

I could see by the way Chuck looked lovingly at his baby pie he must have been looking forward to dessert. In his hesitation, he was struck several more times. Green beans, mashed potatoes (with brown gravy), and a good-sized portion of cornbread hit their marks, the cornbread staying affixed to his face to great comedic effect. I think the wetness of my pudding volley pushed him over the edge.

He grabbed up the wee pie, gave ’er a sniff, shook his head in disappointment, and let the pastry loose at me. I won’t lie; it was a good throw. His team might have beaten us if Chuck could pitch softballs like he did baked goods. The pie left his hand and came at me so fast I screamed out. Not from fear, though. There was a lot in the world for a boy of ten to fear, but little pies weren’t one of them. No, I think it was just the sheer silliness of the whole event. I tried to juke to the left, and rather than avoid the crusty delicacy, I aligned my face and gaping maw directly with Chuck’s salvo.

And you know what? That was the single most defining moment in my life (as far as food goes). I had experienced such a minute sliver of what the world had to offer, which sadly included the sheltered variety of desserts I’d eaten. Chuck did me a favor that day, one he would never know he’d done. Enough of that pie splashed into my mouth that I had an honest-to-God spiritual moment, right there in the middle of a food fight on the last day of Holy Mary, Mother of God Jesus Camp. I quietly excused myself from the melee, snuck past the ineffective counselors, and ran (not walked) back to the dessert area to search for a matching pie.

There, in the back, behind what I knew to be run-of-the-mill apple pies, was my prize. What was this delicious secret pie my evil mother had kept from me all these years?

Blackberry. It was blackberry pie. Oh, glorious day, we are joined now and forever. Let no man tear asunder the joyous union we hold most sacred.

I reached in past the Great American Apple Pies, as far as my spindly ten-year-old arms could reach, and snatched my quarry. The cacophony of epic battle provided perfect cover for my clandestine gluttony. I had to forego my manners and dig in with my own Dirty-Henry-Fingers.

Yes, I ate the last pie, savoring every bite. I even washed it down with surprisingly still-cold milk. The stars had aligned, and through conflict, I found salvation. Or something like that. I’m pretty sure the point of Pentecostal Mormon Bible Camp was not for me to have a religious experience with a petite blackberry pie, but I’ll take what I can get. We aren’t always masters of our own fates, are we?

Looking back now, I remember questioning my mother (repeatedly) why she never made us blackberry pie, considering the enormous blackberry bush we had growing wild in our own yard. I suppose if the recipe had started with “bring a pot of blackberries to a slow boil, then boil a crust, scoop them together and boil it some more,” her answer may have been quite different. Baking wasn’t really Mom’s thing.

Over the years, I’ve been to numerous barbecues and Fourth of July cookouts. I’ve had the typical foods time and again. Blasphemy or not, I do not like watermelon (or any melon, for that matter). I can enjoy a hot dog, burger, brat, or popsicle as much as anyone. Ice cold beer? Sign me up. But if you ask me what food is summer, then I’ll refer you to my old pal Chuck and the food fight force-fed blackberry pie every time.

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