Story Time #3: Camo Party
Adam looks back at a formative high school experience, donning military fatigues and deftly evading arrest
My high school class was notoriously, at least at the local level, debauched. There were endless parties, roughly three a week, that transpired in the woods, the beach, and the homes of students whose parents were out for the weekend. Cape Cod in the early to mid 2000s was something of a wonderland for young people. Especially in the summer, when the peninsula came alive with season travelers. Surfing, bars, boats, floating in creeks, diving off of bridges, drives up and down the famously scenic road that is 6A, passing out at your friends’ houses and waking up early to smoke weed and then laze about by the ocean once again. Copious drugs. Summer romances. It was an enchanted place to be a young person.
There were more than enough secret locations for kids to gather and illegally drink booze, fuck, and take drugs. Furthermore, Cape Cod was a fairly conservative place at the time. Young men especially were bound to rules of masculine expression that, at least from my perspective as a burgeoning artistic mind, were narrow and limiting. Workwear. Timberland boots. Jeans better not be too tight or the rumor mill would start a turning. Stylish men were faggots. Men who read were faggots. It seems stupid now but in a small graduating class where everyone knew everything about one another, a rumor, even a false rumor, could become a life ending brutality.
In retrospect, I think heavy drinking and hard drugging were for many of the men, and perhaps some of the girls too, the only means of self-expression and catharsis amongst a community that punished its renegades. The partying also made up for a lack in other regards as well, sublimating the sexual drive into self-destructive oblivion. I remember all to well about a neurosis I developed revolving around the fact that while I’d experimented with countless drugs, my sexual experience was limited. By senior year, I’d only had sex with two girls, both of whom I’d severely underwhelmed. It seemed fucking stupid to have already of tried LSD, MDMA and Ketamine before I’d learned how to properly fuck a woman. All I wanted was pussy, which I rarely got. Parties then became a welcome distraction from my most burdensome wanton lust.