The Camp Story

In the middle fifth grade year, I was given a chance to attend a four-day camp alongside approximately 80% of my classmates. We took a fleet of buses to the middle of nowhere (Oklahoma), and the 100 or so of us stayed in cabins with volunteer parents or teachers that had come on the trip with us.

The cabins were large, rustic-looking buildings with four sets of bunk beds in them, meant to house one parent and seven kids. Our "parent" was the father of one of those seven, Kyle, and was a nice man that let us stay up past our allowed bedtimes and play card games with each other.

Aside #1: I specifically remember thinking it was really, really cool that he let us play "Bullshit," even though we had to shorten it to "BS." Even saying the abbreviation made all feel awesome.

I was lucky enough to be one of the kids given a top bunk, for reasons I can't remember (I'm sure we had to draw straws or something), a treat that was sought after in the mindset of my grade.

Anyways, the day after our first night of settling in, the real fun began. Over the next two days, we would play with snakes, practice archery, look at constellations in the sky, and did plenty of other camp-related activities that seemed incredibly exciting at the time.

Aside #2: I'd probably still get excited over archery and snakes, I won't lie to you.

Then, on the third day, we went on our first nature hike. The teachers, camp counselors and parents told us that they were combining our cabins into three large groups, and that we would each be cycling through the three trails the camp had to offer.

So our groups headed off in different directions, counselors leading the pack and telling the first two-thirds of the kids that could hear them all about how neat the wilderness was. I couldn't hear anything, because I was the last person in the massive line, but I enjoyed the walk all the same.

That was, until I felt the all-too familiar sensation of needing to urinate. Badly. Waddling towards the middle of the line where a teacher was stationed, I pulled her aside and explained my issue. She told me to follow the trail that we were on back to the cabins, go to the bathroom, and wait there to join up with them.

Following a trail backwards is simple enough, right? Apparently not. It didn't take five minutes before a combination of my overt curiosity with nature and direction-less being found me lost in the middle of the woods with no one around and nowhere to pee.

I started freaking out, which is exactly what you don't want to do when you have to urinate so bad your stomach hurts. Then I began running aimlessly towards what I thought was the camp, which is the absolute worst thing you can do in the same case.

My panicking plus the jarring motions of running equaled one thing: emptying my entire bladder into my pants with no control over the situation at all.

Aside #3: You might ask why I didn't just zip my fly down and pee out. Well, I was in the fifth grade. I'd just got over my fear of peeing while standing up next to a toilet, I wasn't about to do it in the middle of the woods where someone might see my teeny-tiny junk.

I had no idea what to do with myself. So I kept walking (not running) in the direction I thought camp was in, hoping to get back and change before my hiking group had returned.

A few minutes later, I arrived. The grounds were completely deserted, so I made my way to our cabin and walked in. Stripping my urine-soaked pants, underwear and socks off, I stepped into the bathroom and washed my legs off as much as I could using the sink.

Aside #4: Our cabins only had a sink and toilet, the showers were elsewhere.

Once I felt I had done well enough, I put clean clothes on and looked at my pile of soaked clothes that sat in front of me. Rather than wash them in the sink like a normal person would, I instead opted to hang them all from the rafters above my bed, hoping that they would dry out before we'd return that night.

I stepped outside just as the three groups were arriving at the central campgrounds to swap trails. Re-joining my group, I continued throughout the day as if nothing had happened, with thoughts of my pee-soaked pants lingering in the back of my mind.

When my cabin-mates, our "parent" and I all arrived at the cabin that night, everyone stepped into the room only to have their nostrils assaulted with the smell of putrid, stale urine. Immediately, Kyle's dad called a camp counselor and discreetly told him that "one of the kids must have wet the bed last night" and that the cabin smelled absolutely vile. I didn't tell him what had really happened.

The counselor then told us all to pack up our things, and said that we'd be moving to a different cabin since this one was clearly uninhabitable. As I packed, I thought quickly and stuffed the offensive-smelling clothes into the very bottom of my bag, where the smell no longer affected the air outside of it.

Soon after, rumors started circulating around the camp about who in our cabin had committed the heinous act of peeing the bed, and one of the seven that wasn't me was eventually singled out as the offender. He was alienated for the rest of the trip, and made fun of relentlessly for something he didn't do. Again, I never said a word suggesting that I had anything to do with it.

So I write this as an admission. An admission that I, Tyler Walters, pissed my pants at camp in the fifth grade and let another boy take the fall for it. I'm sorry, boy whose name I forgot, for all of the pain I may have caused you. It wasn't my intention, and I sure hope you didn't end up shooting a bunch of people years later because of it.

The Paul and Chris Stories

Part I - The Gundam Wing Story

When I was in the fifth grade, I didn't have many friends. I'd just dropped out of the Boy Scouts, and was practically shunned by my peers for doing so. During this period, I met and began to idolize a pair of best friends named Paul and Chris. They were the class clowns, if nothing else, and I strived to someday be as popular and funny as them. They were into cool things, like coin-collecting and Gundam Wing; a show about giant battling robots that was much cooler than my admittedly childish obsession, Pokemon. I'd caught the tail end of a few Gundam episodes while waiting for a different show to start, and was hazy on the plot and characters. Some would say that I knew nothing about the subject.

But being the naive optimist I was, I joined in on one of their many conversations about Gundam and was essentially verbally eviscerated by the both of them (as bad as fifth graders can). Their mass amounts of knowledge on the subject far surpassed my terrible memory, and they saw right through my sad attempts to bullshit them. I was crushed. I didn't know what to do.

So I did what any kid would. I complained to my mother. Sort of. Feigning a new interest in Gundam, my mom gladly took me to the toy store to pick out any toy that wasn't Pokemon-related. Walking down the "Giant Robot Suit Toy Aisle" (it exists), I slowly stalked my prey. I didn't want the main protagonist, they'd be expecting that. It was an amateur mistake that I knew well enough to avoid. So I chose a model of one of the lesser characters, piloted by the good-guy-you-think-is-bad-at-first badass character I thought I'd like (if I'd actually watched the show).

But like all good plans, mine had a fault. For some reason, I hadn't read the backer card to the toy before I'd thrown it away, and had forgotten the name of the mech I'd bought. So the next day, I arrived to class with the toy stowed away in my backpack, not realizing that I would soon be made a fool of twice by Paul and Chris. And I was. They tore me to pieces again, calling my choice of action figure dumb, and insulting my intelligence because of it. Crushed again, I decided to never try to impress these two again.

Surprisingly, this toy became part of my regular playtime repitoire. I had no knowledge of any of the Gundam canon, so his backstory was mine to control. In my world, he was a cousin to my Transformers figures, a plain sort of robot that kicked ass and took names. Once, he even decapitated two LEGO figures that looked vaguely similar to Paul and Chris.

Part II - The "Weird Al" Story

A few weeks after the Gundam story, I'd finally begun to find my friends niche in my classroom. Paul and Chris were far from my mind, and I had finally earned the respect and admiration from my teacher, Mrs. Holden. A curvy, 30-something black woman, Mrs. Holden would rarely dole out compliments and praise, yet she'd been throwing metaphorical gold stars my way for weeks.

Anyways, show and tell was coming up, and I had the perfect plan. At this age, I was near-obsessed with parody musician "Weird Al" Yankovic, thinking that his work was the funniest thing I'd ever heard. I liked one album in particular, a compilation of food-based songs from some of his previous albums. I planned on taking this CD into class, and playing my favorite song from it. Surely, some of Weird Al's funny would rub off on me, and make Mrs. Holden like me, right?

Nope. Thirty seconds into the song ("Taco Grande," a song parodying "Rico Suave"), I was standing next to the boombox on a stool, not realizing that I hadn't planned on doing anything remotely entertaining while it played. Sweating profusely, I closed my eyes. Someone yelled something. Mrs. Holden stepped over and turned the music off. I opened my eyes, and saw Chris talking to Paul in front of me. They smiled, and Paul walked over.

Apparently, Chris had noticed that Paul was mouthing all of the words to the song, and was so impressed with this that he shouted at Mrs. Holden to restart it, so that he could do it in front of the class. Grinning, Paul told the class to come in close so that they could hear him. Thirty students came rushing forward, and the song was restarted. Paul sang along to the entire song, Mrs. Holden clapping and cheering along the entire way. At the end, the classroom erupted into applause. Everyone shuffled back to their seats, impressed with Paul's "incredible ability."

Having already taken my seat in shame, I'd forgotten that my CD was still in the player, and had to perform a very embarrassing walk/run to the stool while everyone stared at me.

After that school year, I moved away and never saw them again. But if I were to meet the adult version of Paul and Chris someday, I'd like to tell them these stories, and we'd probably laugh at how childish and immature it all was. We might even be good friends. Or they'd still think I was a loser, and I'd smash their faces in with a baseball bat. Either way.