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 Adidas Story

When I was in the ninth grade, I'd finally realized that the clothes on my back and the shoes on my feet were an important tool to show people what social group I thought I belonged in. During

my appearance-experimentation phase, I became friends with a kid my age that rode my bus, named Colin.

Colin was, for a freshman, a total stud. I, on the other hand, was not. With a nose far too large for my face, and an attitude that would have better suited someone half my age, I didn't exactly have women falling at my feet. Sure, the odd girl found my behavior charming, but they were few and far between. So I started to change and mature, using Colin as a sort of guide to do so. I'm not sure if he ever noticed, but I definitely idolized him, in the way friends do.

One week, Colin came to school with a brand new pair of black and white Adidas on.

Aside #1:
These were the shoes:

After seeing them on his feet, I wanted a pair for myself. Though initially cautious about buying a teenager a pair of all-white shoes, my mother finally agreed to take me out to get some of my own after a few days of begging and talking them up. I couldn't have been happier.

So naturally, we went to the shoe store one afternoon after school and bought a pair. I wore them home, and continued wearing them well into the evening. Before I went to bed that night, I even struggled to form a fitting outfit for my new shoes' debut, something I had never done before in my life.

The next day, I wore the fuck out of my new shoes. Compliments came in left and right, some from people I didn't know. Colin, instead of being weirded out, embraced our twin footwear and was amongst the complimentary.

The story should have ended there, but it didn't. You see, Colin didn't only ride my bus, he was also in my art class. The week I got my new shoes happened to be the same week that we were studying chalk pastels in said class. Normally this wouldn't have been a big deal, but Colin and I began talking about how plain our shoes were, and how cool it would be if we got different-colored laces for them.

Aside #2: Anyone that went to school between 1985 and 2005 knows that all kids fucking loved weird or colorful shoelaces, for some reason.

Then, unfortunately, we realized we had boxes of the perfect shoelace-coloring devices sitting on the table in front of us. With 15 minutes left in class, I quickly untied and removed my laces and put them on the table in front of us. Deciding to go with a multicolored effect rather than one single color, we each took one and went to work.

A few minutes later, we finished. Streaked with every color in the 24-pastel box, we both agreed that they looked awesome.

Aside #3: They looked awful. Seriously. Like someone had eaten Froot Loops, a rainbow, and a gay person before throwing up on them.

So I laced my shoes back up, and was on my way. Art class was during the latter half of the day, so I didn't have much longer before I went home. But in those few hours between coloring my shoelaces and going home, something terrible was happening to the tongues of my shoes.

You see, when Colin and I were discussing our coloring project, we reasoned that if it looked bad, I'd just go home and wash the laces. No harm, no foul. But the 14 year-old me didn't realize that the treated leather that they used for the outer sole of my shoes was porous, meaning that every single rogue, powdery molecule of the chalk pastels that we'd used had seeped deep into said pores, dying the material permanently. I tried everything to remove it: toothbrushes, soap, putting them in the laundry, and plenty of other things. But nothing worked. They were ruined forever.

I don't think I need to describe how angry my parents were. Let's just say that if "being sent to bed without dinner" was actually still considered a punishment, I would have been sent to bed without dinner. As it stood, I was grounded for a indeterminate amount of time, and had to pay my parents back for the money they'd spent on my shoes by doing tons of chores around the house.

For some reason, I thought this was the biggest travesty that the world had ever seen. So that night, I hatched a plan. Swiping a few sheets of printer paper from my stepdad's office, I decided to start a petition, rallying against my parents' decision to ground me.

Aside #4: There was a lot of Fox News on in my house at the time. Don't ask.

For the next three days, I gathered signatures from everyone I saw at school. Of course, I told them about the situation that had led me where I was, and every single peer sided with me unquestionably. After around signature #100, I started to get cocky, and began asking teachers to sign it. In my mind, getting a single autograph from a grown adult was worth dozens, if not hundreds of teenage signatures. But none of them would agree to sign it.

Aside #5: In retrospect, this was probably wise on their part, since my parents would have likely called and complained to someone important (because that's the type of people they were).

But finally, on the third and final day of my quest, my elderly female English teacher decided that she'd take the risk, and lend her name for my cause. Even better, she told me that she was going to write my parents a note on the subject, something that both surprised and flattered me.

After I got the pages back, I saw that her letter had taken up the entire bottom half of the last page, the top having already been filled with my classmates' multicolored handwriting. Impressed with myself, I read over what she had written. Then I read it again. And again. It went something like this:

To the parents of Tyler Walters:

I'm writing you this letter to tell you that your son has been distracting other students with this petition in every class for the last three days. His other teachers and I had a meeting yesterday, and decided that if this doesn't stop, we will have no choice other than to punish him for interfering with class.

Thank you for your time,

(signature)

Aside #6: I'm paraphrasing, but as far as I can remember, this is almost exactly what it said.

I started panicking. They had held a meeting? About me? Seriously? I didn't know what to do. So I did what any stupid high schooler would do: I tore off the bottom half of the sheet containing my teacher's letter, and threw it away, not wanting to throw out the entire sheet and waste the other half-page of signatures I'd worked so hard to get.

Thinking I was off the hook, I took my finished petition home, with over 150 signatures spread across three-and-a-half pieces of paper. But the instant I crossed the threshold into my house, I could sense something was awry. There was a palpable tension in the air, one that had definitely not been there that morning before I'd left. Slowly walking into the kitchen, I found my mother sitting at the dinner table, reading a magazine. She looked up, and I could tell something was wrong.

Then the yelling started. The teacher that had written that note had called my house right after she'd written it, to ensure it was actually delivered. It wasn't, of course. But the teacher had gone ahead and told my mother exactly what it had said, and then some, claiming that I was a "nuisance," had "no respect for authority" (as evident by my petition, she explained), and was a "massive distraction to (myself) and others." It was absolutely devastating.

But that wasn't the worst part. After verbally annihilating me, my mother asked me for the three-and-a-half sheets of paper that had caused so much grief. After scanning it over, she asked me about some of the stranger names that were written down. I guess that I had been so caught up in collecting signatures, that I didn't notice that a decent portion were completely made-up by the assholes I apparently went to school with. Feeling like I'd lost some great battle, I sulked up to my room to begin what felt like a long-term prison sentence.

A few years later, when we sold them in a garage sale to people that had come by to pick through our junk, my mother was forced to sell them for a price considerably lower than the one marked on the tag, only because of the multicolored smudges. I couldn't help but smile a bit as the man that walked away with them told his wife that he was sure he could get them out with some "dish soap and elbow grease." He'd learn.