Nola: A Memoir of Faith, Art, and Madness

The Silver Sword Society

The Silver Sword Society I was good at curses when I was twelve. I could put a curse on you and make it stick. But I had to be able to get close to you first. That summer , I was at Granite Lake Camp near Keene, New Hampshire. My mother was writing at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, and Nola was staying in a boarding house in town. Nola claimed my mother's cabin was haunted. Few places in the world weren't haunted, according to her. My brother,Jonathan, was, for a while, a counselor at Granite Lake, until he pulled a prank on his bratty charges, informing them in the middle ofone night that their parents were on the way to pick them up and they had better hurry and get packed. So, at 5 A.M. four ten-year-old boys stood sleepily on the front porch oftheir cabin, leaning against one another, suitcases brimming. They waited there for an hour until the head counselor, Lou, walked by and asked them what the hell was going on. That summer Woodstock was just a rumor, although we marched around the camp singing, "For it's one, two, three, what are we fighting for? Don't ask me, I don't give a damn, next stop is Vietnam," as though it were just another camp song. Lou hated that, and he hated me because I refused to put my hand over my heart or recite the Pledge ofAllegiance. My friends and I liked to run things up the flagpole and see who saluted. That was our favorite saying. We never actually ran anything up the flagpole to see who saluted, and in the manner oftwelve-yearolds , we used the saying often and inappropriately. My folks are coming to visit today. Let's run them up the flagpole and see who salutes. This was the summer Nola met her Guru, Sri Ramanuja. The summer after Nola returned from Brandeis, hallucinating, unable to complete her program. But there were lucid hours, days, months. This was the summer that Nola and Jonny worked picking blueberries until they had blueberry nightmares and had to stop; the summer they went 174 Nola 175 to a psychic and, according toJonathan, the woman told him he was a Hebrew and my mother was an Egyptian and my sister was going to die, but I wasn't there, so I can't know for sure. I was back at Granite Lake Camp, causing mayhem and destruction with my curses. "UP UP UP It's Another Beautiful Day at Granite Lake Camp!" Every morning at six, Lou shouted those words over the camp p.a. system , followed by aJohn Philip Sousa march. Lou was a balding, slight man in his late thirties or early forties in 1970. He always wore a whistle and he knew how to use it. I don't remember him ever smiling. His voice had two registers, loud and earsplitting. I went there two summers. The first year I liked the place, the second year I hated it, although there was no discernible change in the place, just me: the summer I turned twelve versus the summer I turned thirteen. The first year my counselor was a muscular guy named Steve with long Sampson-like tresses, who spoke to us like equals, and never raised his voice. The second year my counselor was a guy from Taiwan whose name I forget. He spoke maybe ten words ofEnglish. The most I ever remember him saying to me was "I gonna KILL you!" as he chased me one afternoon around the outside of our bunkhouse, for what I'm not sure, but I can make a pretty good guess. Most likely, we teased him mercilessly-called him "chink" or some terrible thing like that, and figured ifhe didn't understand us, he wouldn't care.The fact Nola that I came from a family in which I was taught better probably didn't faze me. This was summer camp. We had four kids in the bunk-two I remember distinctly, a kid named Danny Dutch, athletic, smart-alecky, whom everyone called "Douche." The other boy was a fat kid named Eddie, who was going bald at age twelve because he constantly ran his hand through his hair. I thanked my stars for Eddie. Ifnot for him, I would have been the kid in the...