The year was 1991. I was 15 and had a medical diagnosis that mandated I drop a few pounds. I wasn’t a huge kid, but I was chunky. It had never really held me back. I had plenty of friends and maybe a girl or two who “like liked” me, but my school was small and I had been there since first grade so I was stuck with a rep. I was fully friend zoned and was gonna have to deal with that for the remainder of my high school years. But that summer I was signed up to spend six weeks at Camp Colang, a Weight Watchers experience for children of a certain size. I was one of the older campers there, not yet counselor age, but I had to work as a food server for the meals. Little did I know the power that would bestow upon me at a place where calories were watched like the Stasi watching your folk singing neighbor in 1960’s East Berlin. But as I boarded the camp bus, I was somewhat shy, decently nervous, and mostly just embarrassed that I was heading off to fat camp. When I took my seat the first two things I noticed were, 1) most of the other boys on this bus were pretty big. I was here for a medical reason, not a cosmetic one and back in the early 90’s most boys weren’t about to self enroll in fat camp unless they had to and 2) I also quickly realized that most of the girls on this bus were barely overweight, if at all. I knew, even at that young age, the insane double standards our society places on young girls, and that some parents don’t help their daughters navigate this unfair landscape. But society’s inequality was not in my head. All I was thinking was that if these unequal numbers held up in the camp’s gen pop, I, for the first time in my life, might just be in the top 10% of the big three. Weight, looks, athleticism. I had all the other categories handled. Funny, nice, coolness, but those weren’t getting me to 3rd base. You can barely get up to bat with just those.
As the bus pulled out of midtown NYC I sat back, popped the Public Enemy CD into my discman and tried to slip into a bad ass persona I had never met, which was immediately confirmed by Ron, a black kid from Connecticut who saw what I was listening to and decided we’d be friends. Ron had been to this camp before and was a bit like me. A bit heavy, but not someone that was going to the post office for the weekly weigh in (that’s where the largest among us went). He quietly told me that losing weight was fine, but he was coming back for the ladies. That sounded just okee dokee with me. As the bus headed towards Lackawaxen, Pennsylvania nicknamed “lack-of-action,” Ron told me wild tales about how, if you played your cards right, it could be anything but.
The moment I stepped foot in Colang I knew this camp was my place. I remember walking off the bus and seeing a line of cute girls sitting on the fence sizing us up like fresh meat walking into a cattle auction. Holy shit, what was happening? If they were objectifying me, please continue. I’d always wanted to be objectified. Within days of my arrival I had already started hooking up and making out. There was Carrie, the rich Mamaroneck Jewish girl who had been going there for 10 years and was looking for someone new. There was Kate, who was super cute but always had a slightly egg-like taste when we made out. But I wasn’t judging. Then there was Ginger. Oh Ginger. She was a high school junior, softball pitcher from Tennessee, looking to trim down for the D1 college push. She was a powerhouse. And finally there was Melissa, the 19-year-old, South Carolinian counselor, who couldn’t believe she was falling for a punk ass 15-year-old New Yorker. And while this camp was extremely strict with rules around caloric intake, they were inversely lax about campers visiting each other after lights out. The bunks were a non-stop, chunker, swinger party every damn night of the week. You’d sneak out around 11 acting like Ethan Hunt in Mission Impossible only to find that it was like fucking Bourbon street between the bunks. On any given evening you could spot dozens of husky teen couples locked in passionate calorie burning embraces around the bunks. Maybe that was the secret to Colang’s great weight loss results. Sports all day and dry humping all night.
It also didn’t hurt that at meals I was a food server. Rarely in life do you get handed such immense power without doing a single thing. Like a first born son in a long ruling monarchy, I was handed these golden tongs to wield and wield them I did. I didn’t withhold food from the hungry children. That would’ve been cruel. But I freely admit that ladies who caught my eye might be on the receiving end of an additional meatball, or a bit of extra cobbler. I was the one eyed man in the kingdom of the blind. Drunk with power, generous with my serving spoon. My man Ron and I held court over those steam trays handing out make out tickets one cutlet at a time to our wood paneled pleasure palace in bunk B28. Everything was coming up Seth. I was the starting shooting guard on the basketball team, 3rd on the tennis ladder, captain of my color war squad, and I was hooking up with a 19-year-old counselor and her campers at the same time. They’d just have me in their bunk at night and all take turns kissing me. What was happening? Who was this guy? I wasn’t being a dick about it either. It was just a free loving, big boned, teenaged hookup extravaganza. Weight loss Woodstock. Burning calories man.
The sad fact was no one was gonna buy any of this back home. Not a chance. I already had a reputation of lying about my female exploits and no one would believe the sheer numbers of bases I was getting to. “I’m telling you guys, I was kissing three girls at once!” You know what? Screw ‘em. They would see I dropped 18 pounds, but I didn’t need their belief. I had my new buddy Ron and these love letters, with little hearts over the i’s. I had seen the glory, I had reached the mountain top, I had touched boobs. Yes, for those beautiful six weeks I had been the Mack of Camp Colang.
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