Skazka

The sun was sunny side up; bright enough to rendered my flakey baseball cap nearly useless. Not that I was really using it for the sun. At the age of ten, I was blossoming into unfathomable self-awareness. I didn’t like my hair and my face was twisting and molding into something unpleasant to me.

I was at a bus stop. Waiting to get on a coach, and roar away to an upstate resort, Russian by nature and cheap by choice. I was accompanied by my mother and grandmother.
Next to my family was a kid who refused to put on his hat, no matter how incessantly his mother nagged. I stroke a conversation with him, asked him where he was from. He said Brooklyn, and that is as far as I got, as the bus skidded into my view.

At the time I was reading a book by Douglas Adams – I am sure it was his fourth in the Hitchhiker series. I read the whole way.

As I was reading, I caught glimpses of countryside out the blackened window. It looked too stale for me. Nature usually looked stale, at the time.

When the resort came into view, the blandness transposed itself with lifeless rickety shacks peeling with paint. The resort looked consumed by time and disappointment.

The big coach eased to a full stop, and my family and I got our bags from the side of the bus. As we walked, I inwardly wished the half-decent stand-alone shacks, with their corners cobwebbed and the wood black from dissolution, were the ones we rented. And I was praying that the other shacks, tenement-like and rotting, were not, but we got one of those anyway.

We settled in the shack, and I checked the bathroom first, which I was very attached to at the time, with my long shit sessions and all. I also checked the beds. Both underwhelmed.

I didn’t get much from the resort. The free meals were edible, the swimming pool was saturated by insects, and it wasn’t a bad place to read.

But the problem was I had to stay there – and by there I mean Skazka, which translates to Story or Fairytale from Russian – for a month. Eating the unsavory food, swimming with the mosquitos, shitting in a dump. What got me through, and eventually pushed me out, were two phases of friends.

Two because each set of comrades were there for only two weeks, something I was insanely jealous of at the time.

The first phase was an unruly group I met while playing tag, on the first day. It consisted of a rude, weasel-looking punk, a fat redhead, and a conceited eleven year old – everyone else was ten. There were others, but they were forgettable characters.

Unlike the second phase, the first had few standout moments; I remember sitting back in a gazebo, talking, when a retarded teen walked into our manly circle. Now, we were all cruel, but we had no malicious intent for this boy. Our questions were innocent, and we laughed at his responses. And he laughed along too. All was good until the mother stormed in, furious and with the misconstrued notion that we were demeaning her son. One of the boys quickly said “Don’t say anything.” It was the boy from the bus stop. Of course, I had to say something; we weren’t guilty, we just wanted to have a good time.

I said “We weren’t making fun of him.”

And how can a mother like that believe a prepubescent example of group conformity, especially when her son appeared to be the center of a vexing show like this?
Nevertheless, we were, at the time, harangued. We felt bad. When she walked away, the rude weasel said “bitch,” and we got over it.

I spent a large part of the initial two weeks playing computer games in the common room and making racy jokes with the first phase of friends. When they all left, I was not disappointed.

The second phase of friends was split into a lopsided dichotomy; In the first week I deviated from any groups and came to be close friends with a tall red-shirted twelve year old and his nine year old little brother, and the second week I joined a large group that would inevitably lead to my ostracizing.

Week one of phase two included three central characters: the tall twelve year old, his little brother, and a fat kid who shared my name. I clicked well with the red-shirted boy. He was older, and had a great sense of humor, which was a big improvement from the your mom jokes during the first phase. His brother was okay too, because he never said a word, and for that I liked him.

Then there was the fat kid. He was utterly forgettable, and both I and my red-shirted companion agreed he was the inferior of the two Alex’s. My casual friendship with Fat Alex ended when I slapped him across his pudgy cheeks, after he refused get off the resort’s lone computer. He ran away, crying, and I felt bad. It didn’t take me long to get over it though.

My red-shirted friend and his brother left after a week. They sympathized with my month long prison sentence, and when they left, I was disappointed.

So I formed a friendship with whatever other second phase kids were left over. The new group was considerably softer in personality and much less crude than the first phase, which I really didn’t mind. The only boy I remember from the second part of phase two was a ratty looking kid. Incidentally, he was the catalyst for my unavoidable ostracizing.
I remember we were playing with sticks – and my mom, at the time, told me to never play with sticks – when I climbed a tree to separate myself from the battle below. Once I ascended to a nice thick branch about three meters off the ground, the ratty kid – who I was having a one on one stick fight with - continued to pelt me with sticks. With aggravation, I dismounted the tree and dropped down to solid earth, where I could retaliate properly; I grabbed a slender sharp stick and threw it straight at the rat, who was about thirty feet away by now.

What a shot it was! It landed square in the middle of his small eyes, on the bridge of his nose. He screamed “You son of a bitch!” and ran away to his shack – one of the stand-alones – crying. I felt bad, but I got over it.

As it happens, the ratty kid had a ratty older brother and a thick older sister. When I had got back to the common room to play some computer games, the older rat asked me if I had seen his brother, and I told him what had happened, figuring that there was no way out of this. He acknowledged what had happened silently.

Later that night I was playing on the computer, and out of the corner of my eye, I spotted two figures looming towards me. The two were the older brother and some older girl.
“Is it this one?” she asked, pointing to a kid obliviously watching television. The older brother shook his head, and they moved on to me.

“This one?” This time he nodded, and the girl brought down a solid fist to the back of my head. I spontaneously burst into tears. I did not feel bad for what I did to the younger brother anymore.

“Before we leave, I’m going to put you six feet in the ground,” said the older girl, as I nursed the back of my skull. I fled from the common room and ran into my rotting shack.
The final week, hellish as it was, was spent seeking out the neutral boys in the resort. I found a few wimpy kids I could join to ease my irked head; I told them my troubles and they were willing to back me up.

At the time, the inferior Alex, now good friends with the older ratty brother, was taking advantage of my vulnerability, happily jeering at my broken pedestal.
One day he pointed at me as I was passing by and told his new companion how I had cried when he had slapped me. Blasphemy. But I was too catatonic from anxiety, and I passed up the opportunity to retaliate. So the inferior Alex continued his reign as self-appointed superior, and hung out with the older crowd for the rest of the week.
Meanwhile, I had become a human bat, escaping from my wooden cave only at night, hiding in the shadows, and playing with my neutral friends in the dark.

And at the end of the week, while shoving belongings into the side of the bus, distraught and emotional, I realized that just like everything else that bothered me at one point at this resort, I would get over it. I wouldn’t feel bad anymore. I would never see this place or these people again. And this thought made me smile as I looked out the blackened window at the stale vegetation.