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fucking wallow,” said Gary, and pulled his thumb away. “Never fucking wallow. You wallow, you’re pretending you were something else in the first place. I know who I am. I’m Gary. I go down into the street, I’m Gary. I’ve never stopped being Gary. There’s no cure for it. There’s no race. It’s not a race, okay? It’s a contest. Do you get what I’m saying?”
    â€œYes,” I said. “I’m with you.”
    He walked over to the window, a vista of sky, brick.
    â€œDon’t be with me,” said Gary.

Admiral of the Swiss Navy

    I can’t remember the name of the camp. It was somewhere near a lake near Canada. I learned a good deal there that I would later rely upon when I threw away my youth. What I learned when I threw away my youth was crucial in my development as a misdirected man, so maybe it’s all connected. What they say about character is true, though I can’t quite remember what they say about it.
    That summer we used to get stroke books for us to stroke ourselves with at bedtime. We used to get them from this trunk our counselor dragged between our cots.
    â€œDig in, faggots,” he’d say.
    We were all of us vicious getting to the good ones. We’d never seen stuff like this in our towns.
    Some of us used to go smoke cigarettes behind the Port-O-Sans. Mr. Marv caught us one time, wanted to make a point. He was going to send us packing, which I guess is not a big deal looking back, but at the time it was seen as a stain. Plus to have your dad drive up in that sad kind of station wagon. What I did was give Mr. Marv some of the names he needed. I gave him the names of boys you’ve never heard of but who were known saboteurs of good camp citizenship. I’m not sorry I did it, either. If I saw those boys today, I’d say, “You brought it on yourselves.”
    I did see one of them in a coffee shop once. It’s doubtful he made me. His eyes had the ebb of his liver in them and he bore the air of a man who looks right at you and only sees the last of himself.
    â€œDon’t worry,” I told him. “You didn’t miss anything that year. Except maybe Van Wort.”
    â€œWho are you?” he said.
    â€œI’m the ghost of Van Wort,” I said, and got out of there. There’s no gain in having a fellow goner watch you order all-night eggs.
    Van Wort was the fat kid who put our camp all over the local news that summer, and if you were localized near Canada and watching TV back then, you might have caught my debut. I was the one standing in the dining hall saying, “He brought it on himself.”
    I don’t think I believed that, even then, but I guess I wanted to say something memorable, something beyond my years. I could have said what a terrible tragedy it all was, but Mr. Marv seemed to be in charge of that part.
    Mr. Marv was probably of a type but I only ever knew him. He wore swim togs and parted his hair like a magician. They said he was a teacher of history in the winter somewhere. That summer, though, he was just Mr. Marv, blitzed at the bonfire, babbling on about the time he was a kid and sneaked into a ball game. He had come to see this DiMaggio take the field on bad feet. Bone spurs, Mr. Marv told us, ankle damage, the last of the brave.
    What was he talking about, bone spurs?
    What’s so brave about that?
    Â 
    I slept next to Van Wort. I listened to the air whistle in and out of his fat chest. He said he had a chronic bronchial. He said it like a lie he made up a long time ago.
    I watched them come to him night after night, boys with their mosquito sprays, their shampoos, tennis rackets and combs, warm water in toothbrush cups. Van Wort was fat and his name was Van Wort. With that combination, why would you pack your kid off to camp? Let him play with ladybugs in the safety of his own lawn.
    The counselor with the stroke books tortured Van Wort, too. He was just a mean