out of the muzzle and tore into the target. Shooting a gun is a disciplined action. Pull the bolt out, slide the bullet in, and explode out of the muzzle. Katie would frown if we missed and it would break the heart of any boy on the firing line. Pull out, slide in, explode; pull out, slide in, explode. Shooting a gun is a carnal action. Steak! Strippers! It was well over one hundred degrees that day. I did my daily jog, my daily hike, my daily sojourn in that lakeside tent, and my daily woodcutting in an all black hoodie. At the midday formation, right before lunch, I passed out and fell face first into the dirt in the middle of the ex-gunnery sergeant’s announcements. I woke up in the infirmary with my scoutmasters surrounding me with less a look of concern and more a look of annoyance. The camp nurse, Brandon, whose arms were covered from wrist to shoulder in what looked like miniature tattoos of renaissance paintings, had me follow a flashlight without moving my head and had me recite the alphabet backwards. “He needs to go to the ER,” Brandon said. I drifted back to sleep. I woke up again in the back of scoutmaster Urman’s pick-up truck. John was in the front seat. It was dusk. We were on our way to the closest hospital, the one just outside of the Oneida Reservation. We arrived at the hospital, just off of the side of the highway beneath a billboard that had to be at least ten years old advertising a reservation casino. I was seen promptly and was administered an I.V. drip with five percent morphine. I was floating when they told me that I had a heatstroke. This is it, I thought, this is my ticket home. I could already smell the sting of the sea air, I could hear the crashing of the waves and the laughter of my friends, and I could taste the sweet lemonade on my lips. The doctor came back into the room with Urman and John and he told me with a smile that I was good to go back to camp, I just needed to finish the I.V. and I’d be good to go. “I told you you’d be fine,” Urman said as he slapped me on the stomach, playfully, with the back of his hand, “you just gotta stop dressing like such an emo punk.” This made John and the doctor chuckle, and I smiled, this is how men joke, its okay, I told myself. It was at least half-past ten and you could hear the three of our stomach’s grumbling over Urman’s Toby Keith CD—Urman was a tried a true nationalist, any scout who wasn’t at rapt attention during the pledge would be forced to chop wood for hours on end; he had American flag decals on almost everything he owned including the .45 he kept in
the glove compartment six inches John’s chest. As we sped down the mountainous highway we approached this big box building, smack dab in the middle of nowhere, a massive red and yellow neon sign glowed above it—Steak! Strippers!— wreathed with a garland of flashing red and yellow light bulbs. “How ‘bout it boys?” Urman said with the kind of chuckle you only hear when someone tells a dirty joke poorly, “You ready to eat?” “Hell yeah,” John said, he thought he’d sound more confidant, more manly, if he threw hell in there. But he just sounded like an asshole. The only tits John had ever seen at that point were on his family computer when he would sneak downstairs at one in the morning while his parents were asleep. He sounded like a boy who thought he was a man. He sounded just like Urman. Steak and strippers; meat for men who cannot tell the difference between the steak and the strippers. Men who just see an unholy communion of flesh and blood; wolves descending upon the lamb, tearing at the flank and the hind, ripping and cleaving the flesh, swallowing without chewing. Consuming mindlessly and savagely, like good American men, men who have been told that they can take and destroy and devour because this world was made for them. Steak and strippers: a square meal for the American man. We made it back to Kiowa at a quarter-past midnight. We ended up going to a KFC drive-thru— mindless consumption without the erections. I crawled under my mosquito netting and tried to get comfortable on my stiff cot that used to belong to some corporal in Da Nang or Basra. The tent smelled like semen, my bunkmate Nate must’ve been jacking-off to Katie while I was having a stroke. Nate’s a good American man now, a Yale man who studies economics and likes steak and strippers. Polar Bear The fog veiled the lake. It was so peaceful. The bluebirds and finches were singing softly in the forest. The sun was creeping up the horizon, promising a bright and golden dawn. Ducks who were lazily paddling in the lake suddenly took flight in fear of the coming horde. A legion of shirtless boys in their boxers and swim trunks crashed into the still waters, their roar shattered the morning air and silenced the song birds. It was the Polar Bear Plunge, complete with greased watermelons and unchecked and encouraged aggression and the titillating possibility of drowning someone. Boys piling on top of boys, being drawn
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